For your edification:

Oh dear, dear, dear:

Necessary change

Over on Alternet, there's an article entitled "10 Ways to Change Your Life". This is the lead: "With simple modifications to your daily routine, you can be part of a cleaner, more sustainable world." And here's an excerpt:

7. Commit to not wasting
Wasting resources costs the planet and your wallet. Let your clothes hang-dry instead of using the dryer. Take half the trips but stay twice as long. Repair instead of rebuy. The list goes on. In the summer, for every degree above 72°F you set your thermostat, you save 120 pounds of CO2 emissions per year, and if you wash your clothes with cold water you can cut your laundry energy use by up to 90 percent.

8. Take your principles to work
We must act as though we care about the world at work as much as we do at home. Company CEOs or product designers have the power to make a gigantic difference through their business, and so do the rest of us. In commercial buildings, lighting accounts for more than 40 percent of electrical energy use, a huge cause of greenhouse gas production. Using motion and occupancy sensors can cut this use by 10 percent.

Another way of not wasting is to buy a lot of what you need from flea markets, thrift shops and garage sales. I really like the idea of the money I spend going to a non-profit organization or an individual family trying to make ends meet rather than a huge corporation. And when people buy used items that's less stuff to go into the landfills.
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Saturday limerick blogging!

Here you go:

Linda Blair with great favour confessed,
She'd been exorcised, thus finding rest,
But alack and alas
Her old demon came back
and now the poor girl's repossessed.

This has probably made the rounds but it was new to me!
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Friday cat blogging!

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Child-free conservationism

When I was younger (and it was still an option whether or not to have children) I sometimes wanted them and sometimes didn't. I often strongly believed that it was wrong to add to the severe problem our world has of overpopulation. That is the approach taken by Chris Bolgiano in her article entitled "My Mother's Day Gift to the Planet: Not Having Kids". Here's a little bit of what she says:

Although few journalists cover this angle, almost every environmental disaster is caused by overpopulation - but not the kind many assume. It's not the black and brown babies of the developing world that most threaten our planet, but our own desire for stuff - a hunger for iPods and starter castles.

American consumption, and the global pollution associated with supplying it, is unsurpassed. It takes a Third World village to use all the resources that a single American consumes and, often, wastes every day. So even though the birthrate in America is historically low, curbing it further would be a good place to begin when trying to save the world. I am pleased to do my part.
...
It seems to me that the encouragement of childfree couples is crucial to saving the planet.

I agree.

There are many other ways of contributing to the nuturing of the next generation without biologically reproducing. And so even though I'm sad at times that I never had children of my own, I'm also really glad that the children I do have are of the spiritual variety.
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Today's QuickVote

This is from the CNN website. I'm really glad to see the response:

Should physician-assisted suicide be legal for people who are terminally ill?

Yes - 83%

No - 17%

We, as a society, are finally starting to realize that it is just wrong to insist that people who are dying anyway continue to live in excruciating pain until the last bitter moment. That's good news, as far as I'm concerned.
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The problem with banning abortion

I want to call your attention to an article entitled "The Story of My Illegal Abortion". Here's some information that would be helpful for us all to know:

According to a 1958 Kinsey study, illegal abortion was the option chosen by 80 percent of single women with unwanted pregnancies. Statistics on illegal abortion are notoriously unreliable, but the Guttmacher Institute, a respected international organization dedicated to sexual and reproductive health, estimates that during the pre-Roe vs. Wade years there were up to one million illegal abortions performed in the United States each year. Illegal and often unsafe. In 1965, they count almost two hundred known deaths from illegal abortions, but the actual number was, they estimate, much higher, since the majority went unreported.

Here's the thing. I think abortion is a tragedy and I think it is the taking of life. But I don't think they should be made illegal because they will just go underground. I really want to reduce the number of abortions - not just punish women. Studies have shown that countries with legal abortions as well as goodbest sex education and legal abortions have, in fact, the fewest abortions. Why don't we do what actually works instead of what feeds our self-righteousness.
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Oil spill an "act of God" ??????

Oh, I wish I were kidding. But I'm not. Look at what the Republican (of course) governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has said:

I hope we don’t see a knee-jerk reaction across this country that says we’re going to shut down drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, because the cost to this country will be staggering.” Perry questioned whether the spill was “just an act of God that occurred” and said that any “politically driven” decisions could put the U.S. in further economic peril. “From time to time there are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.

Un-freakin'-believable.

Here's what the term actually means:

The legal definition is: "Natural causes directly and exclusively without human intervention and that could not have been prevented by any amount of foresight and pains and care reasonably to have been expected".

Now here's something you should know:

BP cut corners by violating numerous safety regulations and refused to install “a remote-control shutoff switch that two other major oil producers, Norway and Brazil, require.” In fact, the Chamber, which is one of BP’s many trade associations and lobbying fronts, has worked aggressively to oppose regulations and fight for more offshore oil drilling.

The above passages were found right here.
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Simply outstanding snark

Take a look:

There's a show on CBS called 'The Mentalist.' It's about a detective with heightened powers of observation. Let me give you an example of how good this guy is. This guy is so good, he can tell the difference between a Goldman Sachs executive that is a lying crook and a Goldman Sachs executive that's a lying weasel. He's that good.

–David Letterman

And, by the way, the show is worth watching - really. It's a favorite of mine.

(Hat tip to Lisa over at All Hat No Cattle.)
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Limbaugh accuses environmentalists

You know, I don't believe in hating - anybody for any reason. But this morning, I'm finding myself hating Rush Limbaugh with a perfect hatred. He actually has suggested that "wacko environmentalists" are responsible for blowing up the oil rig that created the spill in order to stop more drilling. Take a look:

I want to get back to the timing of the blowing up, the explosion out there in the Gulf of Mexico of this oil rig. ... Now, lest we forget, ladies and gentlemen, the carbon tax bill, cap and trade, that was scheduled to be announced on Earth Day. I remember that. And then it was postponed for a couple of days later after Earth Day, and then of course immigration has now moved in front of it. But this bill, the cap-and-trade bill, was strongly criticized by hardcore environmentalist wackos because it supposedly allowed more offshore drilling and nuclear plants, nuclear plant investment. So, since they're sending SWAT teams down there, folks, since they're sending SWAT teams to inspect the other rigs, what better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants, than by blowing up a rig? I'm just noting the timing here.

It's being called the oil-spill truther movement. Sheesh. Here's one source for the above transcript: Rush: "I'm Just Noting the Timing Here"
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Eight really important words

I want to call your attention to an article entitled "8 Words That Could Save Our Country". Here's the lead:

"Corporations are not people. Money is not speech." These are fundamental truths that our nation needs to remember -- and add to the Constitution.

And here's the first paragrpah:

A rogue Supreme Court seems hellbent on establishing a corporate oligarchy. Congress can’t stop it. Every time Congress or state legislatures tries to curb the power of billionaires or mega corporations the Court slaps them down.

Go read the rest of it if you have time. You won't be sorry.
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May Day

It's May Day, people. International Workers' Day. Here's something we all need to know:

Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie, and stemmed from the pre-Christian holiday of Beltane, a celebration of rebirth and fertility.

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions. Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such books as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Jack London's The Iron Heel. As early as the 1860's, working people agitated to shorten the workday without a cut in pay, but it wasn't until the late 1880's that organized labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday. This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many of the working class.
...
On May 1, 1886, more than 300,000 workers in 13,000 businesses across the United States walked off their jobs in the first May Day celebration in history. In Chicago, the epicenter for the 8-hour day agitators, 40,000 went out on strike...

The above excerpt is from an article by by Eric Chase and you can read it all right here.

So, let me ask you something. Do you think the corporations would have just given us the eight hour work day out of the goodness of their hearts? No? Then this day is important. Really.

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Saturday limerick blogging!

Well! It's Saturday again and so time for a limerick. Here's one that, suprisingly, I don't think I'd ever come across before today:

T. S. Eliot is quite at a loss
When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas
Crying, “What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill On the Floss?”

- by W. H. Auden

By the way, The Mill on the Floss was written by George Eliot, not T.S. Eliot. That's part of why this is a terribly clever limerick!
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