Electricity wasted

Sally Lloyd sent me an article called "Getting savvy about standby power" . Here's part of what it says:

Ever wonder how much electricity your household appliances use when they're supposedly off—in "standby" or "ready" mode? Think of the clock on your microwave, your DVD player that's on but not playing a movie, or the little sensor on the bottom of your TV that waits for a signal from your remote control.

It turns out that these "vampire" loads are gradually sucking away power—a lot of power.

An estimated 13 percent of household electricity use, according to a recent study published by the California Energy Commission, is from appliances in low-power mode (which is to say, not performing any of their primary functions).

Standby mode, the least amount of energy an appliance can use without powering down, is just one example. Many appliances have multiple low-power modes.
...
In 2000, a group of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that each year Americans spend about $4 billion just on standby power.

Generating that electricity puts roughly 27 million tons of CO2-equivalent emissions into the atmosphere (more than 3.7 million cars' worth) every year.
...
If you're looking to reduce your energy use and tread more lightly on the planet, changing your habits is a good starting point.

* Shut your computer and printer down (all the way) when not in use. Some people find it useful to plug all their IT equipment into one power bar, then flip the switch once they've shut down.
* If you have an A/V system that can be turned off entirely without sacrificing performance, do so.
* Keep cell phone chargers out of the wall when you're not charging the phone. Those little power bricks often draw a little current—even when you're phone's not connected.

Sounds like it's worth figuring out a way to turn off the electricity completely when we're not really using it!

The candy lobby and Daylight Saving Time

Did you know this?

Anybody notice that for daylight saving, the change is later this year? It was supposed to be last week. According to the New York Times, Congress made this decision in part from pressure from the candy lobby, who wanted an extra hour for trick or treating. Isn't that unbelievable? I mean, the research lobby can't get stem cell research through. The consumer lobby, we can't get lead out of toys. But by God, when it comes to an extra hour of eating sugar, the candy lobby has the power.

--Jay Leno

Keith Olbermann on torture

A new Keith Olbermann piece is entitled "The Presidency Is Now a Criminal Conspiracy". Here's an excerpt:

Study after study for generation after generation has confirmed that torture gets people to talk, torture gets people to plead, torture gets people to break, but torture does not get them to tell the truth.

Of course, Mr. Bush, this isn’t a problem if you don’t care if the terrorist plots they tell you about are the truth or just something to stop the tormentors from drowning them.

If, say, a president simply needed a constant supply of terrorist threats to keep a country scared.

If, say, he needed phony plots to play hero during, and to boast about interrupting, and to use to distract people from the threat he didn’t interrupt.

If, say, he realized that even terrorized people still need good ghost stories before they will let a president pillage the Constitution, Well, Mr. Bush, who better to dream them up for you than an actual terrorist?

He’ll tell you everything he ever fantasized doing in his most horrific of daydreams, his equivalent of the day you “flew” onto the deck of the Lincoln to explain you’d won in Iraq.

Now if that’s what this is all about, you tortured not because you’re so stupid you think torture produces confession but you tortured because you’re smart enough to know it produces really authentic-sounding fiction - well, then, you’re going to need all the lawyers you can find … because that crime wouldn’t just mean impeachment, would it?

That crime would mean George W. Bush is going to prison.

As usual, the whole commentary is biting and spot on. If you click through on the link above, you can either read the transcript or watch the video.

Unbelievable

This is for real. I looked it up.

Oh, I do love Leno!

Take a look at this:

All these Republicans having gay sex. See, that's why so many women are Democrats, 'cause Democrats will at least have sex with them.

--Jay Leno

The Rapture just can't come too soon

Weather in Tulsa

There's something seriously wrong with the high being 81° on November 4.

Sin, Sorrow and Transformation

Perhaps it is because it is All Saints Sunday and I am remembering my blessed dead and, therefore, feel emotionally a bit raw that the following moved me so much:

A Sin

Committed a sin yesterday, in the hallway, at noon. I roared at my son, I grabbed him by the shirt collar, I frightened him so badly that he cowered and wept, and when he turned to run I grabbed him by the arm so roughly that he flinched, and it was that flicker of fear and pain across his face, the bright eager holy riveting face I have loved for ten years, that stopped me then and haunts me this morning; for I am the father of his fear, I sent it snarling into his heart, and I can never get it out now, which torments me.

Yes, he was picking on his brother, and yes, he had picked on his brother all morning, and yes, this was the culmination of many edgy incidents already, and no, he hadn’t paid the slightest attention to warnings and remonstrations and fulminations, and yes, he had been snide and supercilious all day, and yes, he had deliberately done exactly the thing he had specifically been warned not to do, for murky reasons, but still, I roared at him and grabbed him and terrified him and made him cower, and now there is a dark evil wriggle between us that makes me sit here with my hands over my face, ashamed to the bottom of my bones.

I do not know how sins can be forgiven. I grasp the concept, I admire the genius of the idea, I suspect it to be the seed of all real peace, I savor the Tutus and Gandhis who have the mad courage to live by it, but I do not understand how foul can be made fair. What is done cannot be undone, and my moment of rage in the hallway is an indelible scar on his heart and mine, and while my heart is a ragged old bag after nearly half a century of slings and stings, his is still new, eager, open, suggestible, innocent; he has committed only the small sins of a child, the halting first lies, the failed test paper hidden in the closet, the window broken in petulance, the stolen candy bar, the silent witness as a classmate is bullied, the insults flung like bitter knives.

Whereas I am a man, and have had many lies squirming in my mouth, and have committed calumny, and have evaded the mad and the ragged in the street, ignored the stinking Christ, his rotten teeth, his cloak of soggy newspapers, his voice of broken glass.

No god can forgive what we do to each other; only the injured can summon that extraordinary grace, and where such grace is born we cannot say, for all our fitful genius and miraculous machinery. We use the word god so easily, so casually, as if our label for the incomprehensible meant anything at all; and we forget all too easily that the wriggle of holy is born only through the stammer and stumble of us, who are always children. So we turn again and again to each other, and bow, and ask forgiveness, and mill what mercy we can muster from the muddle of our hearts.

The instant I let go of my son’s sinewy arm in the hallway he sprinted away and slammed the door and flew off the porch and ran down the street and I stood there simmering in shame; then I walked down the hill into the laurel thicket as dense and silent as the dawn of the world and found him there huddled and sobbing. We sat in the moist green dark for a long time, not saying anything, the branches burly and patient. Finally I asked for his forgiveness and he asked for mine and we walked out of the woods changed men.

--Brian Doyle

The betrayal of trust is a dreadful, dreadful thing and perhaps that is what most needs to be forgiven. The betrayer needs it as well as the betrayed. Let us not take lightly the trust of others - especially innocent, naïve trust. That doesn't mean we have no boundaries. That doesn't mean we are obligated to do whatever others want of us. It does mean we need to honor that trust before we disappoint. And it means that if we have to let people down, that we do so as lightly as possible.

UPDATE: Yesterday I mistakenly linked to the WRONG Brian Doyle. I meant to link to Brian Doyle the poet. Entirely by mistake, I linked to Brian Doyle the sex offender. Many thanks to Popi and Tom who called that to my attention! The link has now been changed.

"That awful thing"

The pilot of the Enola Gay died Thursday. And he died still believing the attack was justified. That belief has been thoroughly discredited as is explained in the article entitled "Hiroshima Bomber Unrepentant till Death":

Perhaps the dean among this group of scholars is Professor Gar Alperovitz, who has written a number of books on the subject, including the magisterial “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” which in 1995 demolished once and for all the arguments for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In an op-ed two years ago for The Progressive’s sister organization, the Progressive Media Project, Alperovitz cited a number of recent studies that further bolstered his case.

“Long before the bombings, top American and British policy-makers were aware that a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, combined with assurances for the Japanese emperor, would likely end the conflict,” Alperovitz wrote. “As early as April 29, 1945, for instance, U.S. intelligence advised that entry of the Soviet Union into the war would ‘convince most Japanese at once of the inevitability of complete defeat,’ and further, that if they were persuaded that unconditional surrender ‘did not imply annihilation, surrender might follow fairly quickly.’ ”

Alperovitz listed several prominent generals as decrying the bomb. (Eisenhower said after the war that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”) The most surprising of this bunch is right-wing extremist (and inspiration for Jack D. Ripper in the movie “Dr. Strangelove”) General Curtis LeMay. Even he publicly proclaimed afterward that the war would have been done with in two weeks and that the bomb played no part in hastening its end.

We have much to answer for as a nation.

This was so predictable

Take a look at an article about Karen Hughes entitled "Out to pasture":

...Hughes failed in an assignment for which she had little experience, since her expertise is not foreign affairs, but domestic political campaigns. Despite her confidante status with the president and access to secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, she never really succeeded in her job. Her first failure was not sufficiently making the administration realise that foreign public opinion must be taken into serious consideration in decisions pertaining to America’s role in the world. Public diplomacy, to paraphrase Edward R Murrow, head of USIA during the Kennedy administration, has to be there at the take-off, not at the crash landing. With Hughes, however, it remained essentially a footnote to actions the administration took without substantive thought to the reactions of the rest of mankind. The US did what it wanted, no matter how “they” overseas reacted to “us” in the homeland. Our aggressiveness in the Middle East - and most recently toward Iran - is but one indication of this arrogant attitude.
...
Hughes’s third failure - and that of the administration she serves - is perhaps her worst. It is that American public diplomacy - at its best, an effort by the US to show respect to the opinions of mankind and engage in a global dialogue - has become perceived worldwide as the basest form of propaganda. The educational exchange programmes and cultural presentations Hughes supported are all to the good, but with her public diplomacy justifying policies that much of the world finds appalling, she diminished whatever value public diplomacy can have in advancing US national interests and international understanding.

Would somebody please put a non-partisan career diplomat in charge of this sort of thing?

A little history goes a long way

Well this is certainly illuminating. It's from a comment to an article in the Tulsa World about illegal immigration:

After independence, the formerly Spanish territories were under Mexican control. Mexico forbade Anglo immigration.

Whites consistently broke Mexican law when they illegally invaded California and the Southwest.

In Texas, the Mexican government had given permission for some whites to emigrate. But thousands more Anglo immigrants, or criminals, arrived illegally.

Prior to 1823, there were less than three thousand white people in Texas. At that time, the Mexican government had given Stephen Austin permission to live there along with a few hundred other Gringos, with the condition that they would become Mexican citizens, they would speak Spanish, and they would pledge allegiance to the Mexican government. But white colonists began to enter the territory illegally and brought their slaves with them. Within a decade, whites outnumbered the Hispanic inhabitants. Gringos were interested in the rich agricultural lands of the Texan territory. These were the illegal aliens of their day, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. By 1830, whites outnumbered Mexicans 25,000 to 4,000.

In 1835 Sam Houston, who had illegally crossed into Texas, argued against mixing with the Mexicans, “no matter how long we may live among them.” See Houston speech to Soldiers, January 15, 1836, in the Papers of the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836, gen. Ed. John J. Jenkins, 4:30. The Gringos eventually overwhelmed the original inhabitants of the territory and began to impose the English language on them.

According to Mexican Lieutenant Jose Maria Sanchez, the foreign intruders “have taken possession of practically all the eastern part of Texas, in most cases without the permission of the authorities. They immigrate constantly, finding no one to prevent them, and take possession of the sitio (location) that best suits them without either asking leave or going through any formality other than that of building their homes.”

During the Battle of the Alamo, the defenders were fighting for slavery, which Mexico had abolished in Texas in 1829. After the defeats at the Alamo and Goliad, on April 21, 1836, Sam Houston’s army of less than 800 men defeated Santa Anna's army as it camped out on the San Jacinto River, east of present-day Houston. The next day, Houston's army captured Santa Anna himself and forced him to sign a treaty granting Texas its independence, a treaty that has never ratified by the Mexican government because it was acquired under duress.

Soon after, these Anglo aliens usurped Mexicans’ land. They began to dishonor Mexican land claims. They passed new laws in English, a foreign language for those Mexicans whose border had moved. Often Mexican land was auctioned off for pennies an acre for failure to pay taxes. Mexicans were commonly lynched and whole communities were driven out of Texas towns. Gringos carried out raids in which they murdered Mexicans and forcibly took their land and stocks. Historian A.B.J. Hammet states that Mexican families were “driven from their homes, their cattle and horse and their lands, by an army of reckless, war-crazy people.” In 1839 over a hundred Mexican families were forced to abandon their houses in the town of Nacogdoches by invading Gringos. The mayor of San Antonio in 1840, Juan Seguin, states in his “Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin”, how Mexicans came to him repeatedly from protection of the invading whites. Eventually, he had to flee to Mexico because of personal threats against him.

Anglo outlaws raided Mexican ranches, killing the inhabitants, burning homes and stores. Mexican livestock was declared public property and the invaders forcefully took Mexicans’ property and their land. Mexicans were driven out of Austin in 1853 and again in 1855. They were expelled from Seguin in 1854, from Matagorda and Colorado Counties in 1856, and from Uvalde in 1857.

Rancher Faustino Morales recalls that how the Gringos “came in and drove the Mexicans out and took over their ranches.” See Frank H. Dugan, “The 1850
Affairs of the Brownsfield Separatists”. Southwestern Historical Quarterly 61,no.2.

Years later, whites would also use the Texas Rangers to officially carry out their deeds. “Texas Rangers, in cooperation with land speculators, came into small Mexican villages in the border country, massacred hundreds of unarmed, peaceful Mexicans villagers and seized their lands. See "The Mexican Question in the Southwest", Political Affairs March 1939.

Most of the illegal aliens were land speculators and criminals. William Barret Travis had escaped to Mexican territory after he had killed a man. Jim Bowie was a slave trader who had gone into Texas hoping to make some business; Sam Houston and Davy Crockett had participated in the massacre of the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend.

Abb Emanuel Domenech, a religious missionary in Southern Texas, states in “Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico” that “The Americans of the Texan frontiers are, for the most part, the very scum of society-bankrupts, escaped criminals, old volunteers, who after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, came into a country protected by nothing that could be called a judicial authority, to seek adventure and illicit gains.”

The Anglo invasion of Mexican territory was not confined to Texas. They arrived in droves and illegally occupied great parts of the Southwest and California.

California Governor Pio Pico warned of how “we find ourselves threatened by hordes of Yankee immigrants who have already begun to flock into our country and whose progress we cannot arrest.”

By the late 1800’s, Anglos had acquired four fifths of the Mexican land grants. See A History of Multicultural America, by Ronald Takaki. Six years after Texas independence, 1.3 million acres had been seized by 13 anglos. David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas.

Believing in its racist ideology to wipe out other races by killing Indians and stretching to the Pacific Ocean, the United States had previously offered to purchase the Mexican territories of California, New Mexico, and Arizona for $15 milion. Mexico had indignantly refused the offer. Just as George Bush used the pretext of Weapons of Mass Destruction to attack Irak, US President James Polk then instigated war against Mexico in 1846 in hopes of acquiring Mexican territory. Most historians agree that this war was unjustified. Opponents of the war included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Clay, Mark Twain and Daniel Webster.

One of the most interesting episodes of the Mexican War surrounded the St. Patrick's Battalion. Among the American troops was a contingent of Irish-born soldiers. After the war commenced, 200 of these soldiers concluded that they were fighting on the wrong side. They didn't like the fact that the United States was using its overwhelming might to invade and conquer a much weaker nation. They deserted the American army and began fighting for the Mexican army.

When U.S. Gen. Winfield Scott and his troops reached Mexico City, after invading at Veracruz, they captured the St. Patrick soldiers and hanged 50 of them.

The Mexican War ended with the surrender of Mexico and with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. With this treaty, Mexico lost one-half of its territory. The United States ended up paying what it had previously offered Mexico - $15 million.

But this illegal and unjust war cannot be justified, just as I cannot go into your home, put a gun to your head, force you to sell me your house for $5, and then pretend that this transaction was just or legal.

Now you complain about Mexican invading America. HYPOCRITES!!!

The bigotry around here is sickening. You should see MOST of the comments. You can --- right here.

Still another GOP gay sex scandal

You know, I'm so sick of the hypocrisy of the "family values" party that I'm not even up to giving you any excerpts here. Just click through and read it. Or not. Your choice.

Curtis allegedly had encounter at bookstore

Can you say "self-loathing"? That's right; I knew you could!

Friday cat blogging!

Sox (AKA Demon Cat!)

Photo by Paul Rogers (taken on Halloween)

Man, this is good

Leno snark

This is just pathetic because it's so true:

FEMA had a phony press conference and they had FEMA members posing as reporters asking them easy questions. They had no reporters there, just FEMA members. As opposed to a disaster where it's all reporters and no FEMA members.

--Jay Leno