They come when they come

Insights, that is: they show up at the strangest of moments.

I had dinner tonight with a friend. We had margaritas and Mexican food at La Rondalla, the scene of oh-so-many drunken and crazy nights in the latter half of the 90s. Given the food fights and broken glasses, I'm surprised that any of us are still allowed on the premises. Yet we are.

We had dinner. We walked down the street to one of my faves (Garcon) and had a nightcap: sauvignan blanc for Michael; sidecars for me. And we talked. We talked about relationships. We talked about work. We talked about drinking.

As we finished our conversation on the sidewalk, I talked a bit about Buddhism and its five precepts, fifth among them being abstaining from intoxicants. I told Michael I could see how most of the suffering in my life was related to not following those the five precepts. I said I had considered giving up drinking. I said I could see the benefits of doing so; I said that it was hard to imagine doing it.

I drove to the Castro, San Francisco's gay mecca, and stopped at my favorite bar for a final beer. And when it was done, I did something I'm becoming known for: ending an evening of cocktails with a trip to the supermarket.

It was then that I had my insight. I was carrying my groceries a couple of blocks to my car. I'm 41 years old. I was wearing jeans, tennis shoes, a tight t-shirt, and a hoodie. I passed the boys and girls coming in and out of the bars. I walked by a store with posters advertising the latest sexy gay videos, hot stars smiling over their bare chests.

And it came to me: all of this--the drinking, the clothes, the neighborhood, the sexuality, the energy--was hard to give up for one particular reason. I grew up in a tiny town in Kansas. I was awkward, unattractive, and uncoordinated in junior high. I had no dreams of fame or money, only a hope that I'd someday belong.

Then I came out and eventually discovered a world of flashing lights and beautiful bodies. I worked in high tech and prospered during the dot com era. I got to experience things I had never imagined as that shy, introverted teen. I flew from coast to coast to find the best party. I ignored everything in the pursuit of love. I cavorted with "drug stars and porn dealers." I earned and lost more money in one year than I had ever expected to see in a lifetime.

Whether this was what I wanted or not, it was the only foothold I had ever known in that wider world of What People Want. It was the way I had found to belong. It was acceptance, and more than that, success. But only in the sense of playing somebody else's game very well.

Seeing all of this, I remembered the things that I enjoyed as a kid: reading; quiet, often philosphical, conversation; running.

And it occurred to me that perhaps leaving behind all of the flashing lights and cocktails and beautiful bodies might not be a departure but an arrival, a return to where I started.

I don't know the destination. I don't know the schedule. But little by little, the path becomes clear.

GAO reports on U.S. government's finances

A couple of years ago I heard David Walker, U.S. Comptroller General, speak in Portland about the state of the U.S. government's finances. I just ran across the GAO's latest assessment which contains a preface from Walker. He states:

The federal government faces large and growing structural deficits in the future due primarily to known demographic trends and rising health care costs. These structural deficits—which are virtually certain given the design of our current programs and policies—will mean escalating and ultimately unsustainable federal deficits and debt levels. Based on various measures—and using reasonable assumptions—the federal government’s current fiscal policy is unsustainable. Continuing on this imprudent and unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living, and ultimately our domestic tranquility and national security.

Read the report here and, in particular, check out table 4 on page 10 of the report (which happens to be page 16 of the PDF file). Some highlights:

• In 2000, the U.S. government had roughly $20 trillion in future expenditures on the books. In 2006, the figure had risen to almost $51 trillion. That includes payments on our debt (which has greatly risen during that period), future Social Security and Medicare payments, etc. (Note that for the purposes of this example, "the future" means the next 75 years.)
• That works out to be $190,000 per U.S. household in 2000... and $440,000 in 2006, an increase of 134%.
• During the same period, the median household income rose only 10%, from $41,990 in 2000 to $46,326 in 2006.

In short, the debt burden ratio that each U.S. household carries for the government's future obligations--and which will pay for with our taxes--has more than doubled in this six year period.

Imagine this: to pay for the government's current commitments for the next 75 years, you'd have to fork over almost ten years of your household income. And if I've read the document correctly, that's just to cover things the government has already promised to pay (i.e. debt payments and entitlement programs like Medicare). You'd still be on the hook for everything else the government pays for.

Ten years out of 75, maybe that doesn't sound like such a hugely bad deal. It's roughly 13% of household income. But keep in mind that six years ago when Bush came to Washington, you were only on the hook for 6%.

A few things that caught my eye today

Al Gore testified before Congress today about global warming, warning of a "planetary emergency." If his leadership on the issue inspires you, think about signing a Draft Gore for 2008 petition.

And I read this interesting opinion, entitled "Global Warming Has Gone Hollywood," from Robert Samuelson at Real Clear Politics:

The actual politics of global warming defy Hollywood's stereotypes. It's not saints versus sinners. The lifestyles that produce greenhouse gases are deeply ingrained in modern economies and societies. Without major changes in technology, the consequences may be unalterable. Those who believe that addressing global warming is a moral imperative face an equivalent moral imperative to be candid about the costs, difficulties and uncertainties.

I wholeheartedly agree. Our leaders in Washington have a short term perspective on most issues, and as citizens we don't ask much more of them. The tough question is: how do we build top-down and bottom-up support for making changes that won't necessarily be easy or attractive in the near- or mid-term? My guess is that it'll need to be something that makes people feel good right now and appears to offer an immediate benefit. I suspect that what makes saving for retirement easier for some people is seeing a growing balance on their 401(k) statement and feeling richer today even though they can't touch the money for years.

THERE WAS ALSO THIS INTERESTING PIECE titled "Entropy and Empire," a look at the Roman Empire from the perspective of thermodynamics:

The success of the empire depended on its ability to extract energy surpluses, in the form of food, from the imperial territories and concentrate them at the centre, where they enabled the development of a tremendous degree of organizational complexity. Without a large, and growing, hinterland to collect surpluses from, complexity on such as scale would not have been possible to establish and maintain.

The obvious follow-up question that the post explores is, what is the relevancy for us today? The United States has certainly been extracting large surpluses of the world's resources for fifty years or so, and lately we're paying for our continued spending habits by borrowing from the rest of the world, essentially extracting a surplus of world savings. Like most things that can't keep going on like this, our ability to continue maintaining these surpluses will end. Guess that's when things get interesting... or painful.

LARRY KRAMER, THE 72-YEAR OLD GAY ACTIVIST who helped found Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT-UP in response to the AIDS epidemic in the 80s, remains as outspoken as ever. Yesterday he asked "why straight people hate gays so much?" in an op-ed piece for the LA Times. In his typical fashion, he takes a "no prisoners" approach and paints a very black and white picture. I admit that I agree with some of his points--politicians who claim to support gay rights are sometimes half-hearted, our relationships aren't afforded the same rights as those of straights, we do take anti-gay marriage amendments personally, gays and lesbians are killed simply for their sexual orientation--but while I've defended him in the past, I now feel like he's not willing to look at the world from any other vantage point than his own. I get that extreme voices on one side of an issue do sometimes produce extreme voices at the other; with that in mind, and for all of the work he did in forcing the U.S. government and American society to deal with the AIDS crisis, he has my respect. I just don't think he's very effective any more.

On the other hand, from what I heard of a discussion on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" today, there are people out there on both sides of the debate about what Americans really think about gays who are willing to LISTEN to their counterparts. Listen in here.

AS FOR THE SCANDAL DU JOUR IN WASHINGTON, I say to Congress: Please drop the firing of that handful of U.S. attorneys. It was no doubt political, and if there were no bigger fish to catch, worth investigating. But hello, there a dozen more important things to deal with: getting out of Iraq, Patriot Act abuses by the FBI, our dependence on fossil fuels, the budget deficit, the looming entitlements burden...

Let Gonzales get off the hook on this one. :-)

AND SINCE MOST MEMBERS OF CONGRESS probably don't read my blog, I encourage those people who do to listen to these radio ads from the ACLU. They are being aired in select congressional districts and highlight some of the ways that our Constitutional rights have been eroded in the last few years. You can also read more here. Then consider calling your representatives in Washington to urge them to support legislation to rein in the President's ability to arbitrarily designate individuals as "enemy combatants" and to restore habeas corpus.

March 20: spring equinox and... the four year anniversary of the war in Iraq

Some facts from the New York Times on the last four years in Iraq.

A couple of figures: an estimated 34,000 Iraqi civilians killed last year, and 1.5 million Iraqis displaced to neighboring countries since the war began. (I've read elsewhere that the U.S. has accepted fewer than a thousand refugees.)

The pleasure of the president

Jon Stewart reports on the Attorney General scandal (the firing of the U.S. attorneys) and the administration's "pleasure of the president" line. :-)

Eating local vs. eating organic

Time magazine ran a story a couple of weeks ago about the relative benefits of eating locally grown food versus food grown organically. There's not a clear-cut answer in terms of nutrition, but certainly some foods taste better when they are fresher (e.g. tomatoes) while others may be fine being shipped long distances (e.g. hard squashes). And certainly shipping food long distances has a greater environmental impact.

I'm a locally grown advocate myself, and I met a man a week and a half ago in Salinas with another perspective. I was having dinner with Justin and his parents at the Chamisal Tennis Club, and a new club member who works for Dole made the point that certain areas are better for growing certain foods. Certainly lettuce and the Salinas Valley spring to mind.

In "Eating Better than Organic," Time contributor John Cloud journeys from Whole Foods to Google's campus to Windflower Farms to find his answer. Read the article and this one from Michael Pollan to help you find yours.

(Hat tip to Jack. :-)

The evolution of human morality

Following on yesterday's post about scientists finding antecedents for many human behaviors in species lower on the evolutionary chain, Nicholas Wade has an article in the New York Times today about primate behaviors that may be the basis for human morality:

Though human morality may end in notions of rights and justice and fine ethical distinctions, it begins, Dr. de Waal [of Emory University] says, in concern for others and the understanding of social rules as to how they should be treated. At this lower level, primatologists have shown, there is what they consider to be a sizable overlap between the behavior of people and other social primates.

Social living requires empathy, which is especially evident in chimpanzees, as well as ways of bringing internal hostilities to an end. Every species of ape and monkey has its own protocol for reconciliation after fights, Dr. de Waal has found. If two males fail to make up, female chimpanzees will often bring the rivals together, as if sensing that discord makes their community worse off and more vulnerable to attack by neighbors. Or they will head off a fight by taking stones out of the males’ hands.

Dr. de Waal believes that these actions are undertaken for the greater good of the community, as distinct from person-to-person relationships, and are a significant precursor of morality in human societies.

(I wonder if chimpanzees crank each other? :-)

Crank Yankers!

When we were kids, my cousin Kim, my sister Molly, and I were big crank callers. Who knew that there was a show made for us: Crank Yankers. Hilarious! One of my favorite characters on the show is Hadassah Guberman (played by Sarah Silverman). Here's a good one:



The show previously played on Comedy Central, and you can still find videos from the old seasons there as well as info about the show here.

Last month MTV resurrected the show; check it out.

Interesting reading on consciousness and human behavior

Last fall I read a fascinating article, "Everyday Fairytales," about confabulation, a disorder in which people make up stories which are detailed and logically cohesive. The stories may contain elements of truth, and people telling such stories have no intention to deceive anyone and apparently believe them themselves.

The article went on to explore the idea that the disorder may be an extreme case of something that everyone does on a daily basis, namely making decisions at a subconscious level and then rationalizing their choices at a conscious level. An excerpt:

There is certainly plenty of evidence that much of what we do is the result of unconscious brain processing, and that our consciousness seems to be interpreting what has happened, rather than driving it. For example, experiments in 1985 by Benjamin Libet of the University of California in San Francisco suggested that a signal to move a finger appears in the brain several hundred milliseconds before someone consciously decides to move that finger. The idea that we have conscious free will may be an illusion, at least some of the time.

Even when we think we are making rational choices and decisions, this may be illusory too. The intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalise them, says Kringelbach. That may well be a good thing, he adds. If we were aware of how we made every choice we would never get anything done - we cannot hold that much information in our consciousness. Wilson backs up this idea with some numbers: he says our senses may take in more than 11 million pieces of information each second, whereas even the most liberal estimates suggest that we are conscious of just 40 of these.

Today's Washington Post has an article, "Behavior May Suggest We're Not Only Human," which explores the possibility that a lot of human behavior isn't as unique to our species as we would like to think:

The idea that human behavior -- not just our physical bodies -- may have long evolutionary antecedents raises complicated questions about human agency and about how much of what we do and think is hard-wired. It is one thing to say we have eyes because our ancestors had eyes, but should we also credit our evolutionary predecessors for our highly complex social and political arrangements?

As I contemplate this all, the takeaway for me is this: it's all very good to claim that we have free will; it's quite another to exercise it. We all have the capacity to choose freely and with mindfulness, yet it's quite easy to never avail ourselves of that potential. Exploring what it means to be human requires an acceptance of our limitations and a bold willingness to embrace our ability to transcend. We are simultaneously rooting in the mud and reaching for the stars... it's where we choose to focus which awakens our humanity.

AFTER WRITING THE ABOVE I meditated, and the thought that came to mind is that growing and developing as a human being requires that we train ourselves not only at the conscious level but also at the unconscious. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I suspect that meditation is one path to accomplish it.

Climate changes... and the phone feature I've been waiting for!

Saw a couple of stories related to climate change today:

• Antarctic Glaciers' Sloughing Has Scientists at a Loss
• Winter Has Been World's Warmest on Record

(And interestingly, CNN is also reporting that they've discovered huge ice deposits on Mars... if they melted, they'd cover the planet to a depth of 36 feet!)

And I read an article yesterday about a new phone service from GrandCentral.com. Basically, they give you a new number which rings all of your existing numbers, but completely under your control. I.e. you can choose which phone is rung by co-workers depending on the time of day, record different outgoing voicemail messages for different callers or groups of people, etc. And they have a feature that I have been wanting for years:

Anytime during a call, you can press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you can pick up on a different phone in midconversation, unbeknownst to the person on the other end. For example, if you’re heading out the door, you can switch a landline call to your cellphone — or as you arrive home, a cell call to a landline, in order to save airtime minutes.

Right now it's in beta and free (and their website says that they will always offer a basic set of services for free once their test period is over). I'm giving it a try... stay tuned!

A physicist and physics

My friend Madison and I headed over to Berkeley tonight for a lecture by Stephen Hawking. This was my second opportunity to listen to one of the most brilliant people on the planet; I went to another of his lectures a few years ago in Portland.

But for some really mind-blowing physics, read this article about a scientific experiment which aims to see if we can change events that have already happened! Maybe I can with that lottery pot after all! :-)

Monterey and sensible seafood choices

Wow, what gorgeous weather we've been having in the Bay Area!

Last Saturday my friend Michael and I went on a 37 mile bike ride from the Presidio in San Francisco through Sausalito and Corte Madera, finally stopping in Tiburon for a late (and long) lunch. We headed back across the Golden Gate bridge just in time to catch the sunset.

Sunday I drove down to Carmel with Justin and enjoyed two fantastic days on the Monterey Peninsula with his parents. The temperature was in the high 70s... perfect!

Monday we spent most of the afternoon at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I have been a few times before, but not in the last ten years. As I remembered from previous visits, the otters were so much fun to watch. If I had to be an animal, an otter would be in my top five. :-) Our consensus was that the most memorable exhibits were the jellyfish, the otters, and the gigantic, primitive, and vaguely forlorn sunfish in one of the big tanks. Here's a picture of a sunfish... they can be up to ten feet tall:


The jellyfish exhibit was new since my last visit. They had specimens as small as peas and some ten feet or longer. Some of the most beautiful were tiny and almost completely clear. They appeared to have scintallating electrical current running along their bodies, but the displays explained that we were actually seeing light reflected by tiny "hairs" on their bodies that acted as prisms. (Click here and then on the "comb jelly" link.)

One narrow room had jellyfish tanks on either side. I thought it would be an amazing place to meditate... all I have to do is win the next $360 million lottery jackpot. :-)

We also spent some time in the exhibit depicting the boom and bust history of Monterey's sardine fishing business. I've walked right past it every time I've been there before, but it caught my eye this time. It was fascinating to read about the process of turning shiploads of sardines (up to 10 tons being unloaded per minute) into countless tin cans of cooked sardines. The number of sardines caught exploded during World War II: European fishermen were pretty much side-lined, and we shipped most of the Monterey catch over there.

But in a tale that echoes more recent warnings, we caught so many sardines that the catch plummeted drastically, falling off even more quickly than it had risen. The Monterey fishing fleet simply fished the sardine to near extinction.

The Aquarium had a number of new exhibits which sought to educate the public on the perils of over-fishing and the specific impact of eating various types of fish. More information on making sensible seafood choices here.

And for more California coastal conservation info, go here.

Sunrise down under

My friend Gregg in Perth, Australia, sent me this photograph of a sunrise... enjoy!

"Trust me"

For anyone who's been willing to take the Bush administration's "trust me" line on issues of domestic surveillance, here's evidence of why they can't be trusted:

The F.B.I. has improperly used provisions of the USA Patriot Act to obtain thousands of telephone, business and financial records without prior judicial approval, the Justice Department’s inspector general said today in a report that embarrassed the F.B.I. and ignited outrage on Capitol Hill.

Read the story in the New York Times here and the Washington Post here.

Another mouthful

Wow, Andrew Sullivan lays into Bush. I couldn't agree more. Read it here.

A mouthful from Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan, a conservative himself, offers a pretty powerful indictment of the state of conservatism in America today.

James Dobson in the news

This morning I ran across a couple of items about James Dobson. Dobson heads the evangelical organization Focus on the Family and is one of the most powerful leaders of the Christian right. When I was in junior high I had to sit through a day of Focus on the Family videos. At a public school!

On Monday Terry Gross of NPR's "Fresh Air" broadcast an interview with the author of a new book about Dobson.

And Andrew Sullivan blogged about another evangelical leader, Jim Wallis, who is calling on Dobson to join him in a dialogue about what really constitute the "great moral issues of our time." Dobson says they are abortion, the sanctity of marriage, and teen sexual abstinence. Wallis counters with global warming, poverty, hunger, disease pandemics, and genocide in Darfur. Check our Wallis' open letter here.

Draft Gore!

Al Gore didn't inspire me in 2000. That was true, at least, until his concession speech 36 days after the election that year: "There is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party."

That speech, of course, came nine months before September 11. It came before all of the efforts of the Bush administration to consolidate power in the executive branch and to limit our civil liberties in the name of security. It came before our pre-emptive--and in retrospect, mistaken--invasion of Iraq. It came before the increasingly harsh and partisan politics of the last six years... a period when the concept of the common good has all but been extinguished.

But Gore came back. He found his voice in speaking about global warming. He has won an Oscar and has been nominated for a Nobel prize.

Humility. Compassion. Commitment. Wisdom. All words that today I would use to describe Al Gore.

While Gore has said that he has no plans to run again, perhaps if he hears from enough of us he will reconsider. I just signed a couple of petitions to draft Al Gore to run for the presidency in 2008. If you are so inclined and are hungry for a change yourself, go here and here. You can also get on his mailing list at AlGore.com.

Tipping point for me vis a vis Iraq

In the last couple of weeks, something has shifted for me with respect to U.S. policy in Iraq. I can't remember exactly when it happened, but it did happen in a moment: the weight of everything I knew about the situation there flipped my opinion on what we should be doing.

I was opposed to going to war, but ever since we toppled Saddam Hussein, I've argued that it's our responsibility to restore order in the country. We broke it, we gotta fix it.

I've been appalled by the loss of life and the waste of money there. I was disgusted by Abu Ghraib. I have sat sadly watching U.S. standing in the world decline.

But all along, I believed we owed it to the Iraqi people to stick things out and make them right again.

I see now that that ain't going to happen. For quite some time the presence of our troops there has been fuel to the insurgency's fire. The conflict has reached the level of a civil war.

Yes, we broke Iraq by removing a dictator who oppressed the Shiites and Kurds and maintained a stable society. But the mess there is no longer simply explained by that. Old hostilities have surfaced; new forces are at work. Barbarians are not only at the gate but loose in Baghdad.

The Bush administration has done a horrible job of trying to reconstruct Iraq. We went in unprepared to govern and never recovered from our early mistakes.

Yet the Iraqis are responsible, too. Collectively they could have stood together as Iraqis and chosen to rebuild as one people. Instead they've chosen loyalty to their sect: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd. And yes, I understand that Iraq doesn't have a long history as a nation and that it was created during the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by the Western powers at the end of World War I. And it's not that choosing to be first and foremost Iraqis is the right choice. Unfortunately, though, it's the choice that the Bush administration expected the Iraqis to make. When they didn't, our hopes for a smooth transition to a new post-Saddam government collapsed.

It's time now for the Iraqis to figure it out. No doubt there will be more bloodshed... more deaths to follow the countless who have already died. But I no longer get the sense that we are wanted there, either by the Iraqi people or government.

We have run our course there. We failed. Leaving now is not playing in to the terrorists' strategy. If anything is true, it's that we played into their strategy by entering Iraq, not by leaving. As long as we stay, we empower them. For every terrorist that dies in Iraq (and most that we kill there are locals fighting for their country, not terrorists), a handful more are born out of Muslim anger over U.S. actions in the Middle East.

I do not know what the path to stability and freedom in Iraq is. I do not know the way to peace in the Middle East. But we are not on it. And it's time to accept that we've spent enough American lives and treasure on the road to nowhere.

Andrew Sullivan adds this.

Suburbia

So... a few quick items. Was reading The Oil Drum blog last night and saw the trailer for Escape from Suburbia, the sequel to the 2004 documentary, The End of Suburbia. Haven't seen the original, but it certainly reminds me of one of the key themes of James Howard Kunstler's great book, The Long Emergency. Kunstler makes the case that the U.S. spent the vast majority of its post-WWII wealth on building suburbia, a way of life totally dependent on cheap fossil fuels. As the supply of that cheap energy begins to dwindle, Kunstler and these documentary filmmakers suggest that those in the suburbs are in for tough times.

NOT PARTICULARLY RELATED unless a lot of the older gay men who used to live in San Francisco have moved to the suburbs, I ran across these statistics on the local gay population in an article in the Bay Area Reporter last month:

The day began with an overlook of who makes up San Francisco's gay male population. The city estimates there are 63,577 gay men living in San Francisco, an increase of more than 10,000 over the last five years. About 75 percent of those men are between the ages of 21 and 40, while 14,000 are HIV-positive. [Italics added]

The majority are Caucasian, at 66 percent, with Latinos the next largest group at 13 percent. African Americans and Asians comprise 6 percent each.

I have to admit to being a bit astonished to find that 75% of the gay populatlion here is younger than me! :-)

The other explanation, of course, is that much of the older population died of AIDS in the 80s and 90s, but I would have thought that a lot of younger men would have entered the post-40 population during the past 12 years since protease inhibitors came on the market and so altered the progression of the disease in western countries. Hmm... more research.

AND FINALLY, AN UPDATE ON ANN COULTER'S slurring of John Edwards as a "faggot" at the Conservative Political Action Committee's conference last week. Check out conservative (and gay) writer Andrew Sullivan's thoughts on the matter in his Daily Dish blog today. (Sullivan, by they way, wrote a lengthy essay on living with AIDS in the age of protease inhibitors in his excellent book, Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival.

NY Times on the origin of God

There was a long but very interesting article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine, "Darwin's God." Does the architecture of the human mind have a predisposition for believing in the supernatural in general and a God in particular? And if it does, is it a byproduct of some other evolutionary adaptation, or did the development of this trait itself provide a survival advantage?

Furthermore, does having an innate tendency to believe in the existence of God have any bearing on whether or not there is, in fact, a God?

“Christian theology teaches that people were crafted by God to be in a loving relationship with him and other people,” [psychologist Justin] Barrett wrote in his e-mail message. “Why wouldn’t God, then, design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them, he wrote. “Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?”

LifeCycle update

For those of you who are interested, things are picking up with my training for the AIDS LifeCycle. I did a 25 mile ride to Sausalito yesterday and finished the day feeling pretty good. (Yeah, I know, a short ride, but my first of any distance and it didn't feel bad at all. :-)

My new Yakima rack is on my car as of this morning, so I'm looking forward to some biking adventures.

And I hit $1585 in contributions today! (If you are interested in contributing, just click here.)

U.S. predicts 11% increase in CO2 emissions over next decade

A new government report predicts that U.S. carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow at the same rate over the next decade as in the previous decade. Furthermore:

The report also contains sections describing growing risks to water supplies, coasts and ecosystems around the United States from the anticipated temperature and precipitation changes driven by the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases....

The report arrives at a moment when advocates of controls are winning new support in statehouses and Congress, not to mention Hollywood, where former Vice President Al Gore’s cautionary documentary on the subject, An Inconvenient Truth, just won an Academy Award. Five western governors have just announced plans to create a program to cap and then trade carbon-dioxide emissions. And on Capitol Hill, half a dozen bills have been introduced to curb emissions, with more expected.

So how about taking this opportunity to write your Representative and Senators and weigh in on the issue?

Shocking... and sad

Okay, I have to say this one left me speechless. Ann Coulter referring to John Edwards as a "faggot" in front of a crowd of young convervatives at a Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference. And here's a post about her calling Al Gore a "fag" last summer.

Andrew Sullivan had several posts on her comments and the conference here and here.

Something else about our health care system to consider

If you haven't figured out by now, I am a fan of Michael Ventura and his Letters at 3am column in the Austin Chronicle. In January he had this to say ("110,000 a Year") about our health care system:

... Our health care system is a far greater threat to national security than Muslim terrorists. We don't want to hear that. We don't want to hear that we're endangered less by terrorism than by the passivity of health-care professionals toward managed care, by corrupt lobbying, by overemphasizing the profit motive where it doesn't belong, by insisting on the American medical system when there's ample proof that other systems work better.

Geezer squeezers... and health coverage

So I've been wondering for some time now if I'm going to be part of the last generation that will grow old looking its age (I'm 41). My concern is that a new generation of beauty treatments will come along in the next decade which will eliminate the appearance of aging, and everyone younger than me will be able to avoid the lines, wrinkles, spots, and rock slides of aging.

On the other hand, it's occurred to me that that development might just give those of us who will be looking like geezers an exotic aura... and usher in an era of "geezer squeezers" who want to jump our bones. (I know, wishful thinking!)

I read "Is Looking Your Age Now Taboo?" in the New York Times that explores the issue... read on.

I promise I won't get a face lift if you won't!

BUT AS LONG AS WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT (health care, that is), a more important story also showed up in the Times. A recent poll shows that a majority of Americans think that the government should guarantee health care to all citizens. And they're willing to pay higher taxes to make it happen.

I have to admit to understanding the issue a lot more clearly since becoming self-employed. Interestingly, six out of ten people in the poll said that someone in their household had gone without health care due to the cost.

Read the article here. And if you haven't read it before, Malcolm Gladwell's piece in the New Yorker, "The Moral-Hazard Myth," is worth the time.

Harper's article now online

I mentioned "Parties of God," an article in the latest Harper's magazine in a post last week. It's now online.

Quote of the day

I'm going to convince you that you must make every act count, because you're only going to be here a short while.

-- Don Juan in Carlos Castaneda's Journey to Ixtlan

Gay marriage... just like yours, only gayer

The Freedom to Marry Coalition of Massachusetts has commissioned three new ads supporting gay marriage. (Massachusetts, of course, is the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The theme is, "Gay marriage: just like yours. Only gayer." From personal experience, I'd say "yes" and "no." But given that I'm "divorced," I guess my marriage was like a lot of peoples!

Freedom and reality in the computer age

Just read Michael Ventura's latest column, "This Dependent Dingus" in which he makes this interesting assertion:

The value the computer stands for--in its function--is interdependence. A vital value. The typewriter stands for the equally essential value of independence. True liberty consists of fair play between those seemingly opposite values.

I thought of the First Amendment, which I had already been planning to post here:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

In the age of the computer, the internet, surveillance cameras, and Google Earth, how do we preserve our civil rights? How do we protect our freedom to speak as well as our privacy?

And in this age, how do we know what is real? My friend Antonio sent me "Reviewing 'Reality'", an article about New York Times columnist Frank Rich. It's in the March/April 2007 Harvard Magazine. An excerpt:

Image wins out over reality more and more in the battle for attention and belief. Virtually every public event now arrives filtered through a lens, laptop computer, or recording device, and hence nearly all our daily news has been “produced” and woven into some kind of narrative. Old-fashioned, relatively unmediated reality at times appears obsolete.