The resemblance doesn't stop here!
Another cry for Big Daddy.
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"Don't Let The Bastards Get You Down."
35 comments:
What, am I your whipping boy?
Look, you can't be a conservative and not be an environmentalist. Just doesn't work.
If you're a religious conservative, it's a "Steward of God's creation" thing.
If you're a fiscal conservative, it's that fact that it's cheaper, in the long run, not to have to clean up your stinking messes and get it right the first time.
Conservatives are all about personal responsibility and doing your part to reduce your impact is a part of that.
When did conservatives become the bootlickers of big business? I thought we were about the freedom of the individual over groups = be they grouping by ethnicity, or large spiritless corporations?
but what about the freedom of the individual to choose the best lightbulb for your life style?
big business got big because folks bought their stuff. and is why little folks invest in them through pension plans and index funds.
and when did conservatives start being enviro nanny-staters?
GO KAL!
Big Business got big because they connived and lied and ... damn, what's the word ... cooperated is the base of it, but it has to do more with backroom social manipulations ... colluded, that's the word.
They designed our schools ... literally and openly! ... to enslave the general population through fucked up "education" and then they used their money and their aristocratic-type family connections to the govt and the judiciary to force the populace to accept their idiot "schooling." They purposely teach fact-acceptance instead of thinking. They purposely teach that happiness is to be found through things (and generally are pretty good at inserting which "things" will make you most "happy").
They've had America (and most other First World countries, especially all of Western Europe) by the mental small-hairs for several generations. They keep us panting for the Dream while the money seems somehow to get more and more concentrated ...
The evidence suggests they are the badguys.
I completely agree with Kal. And add that as a pro-lifer, supporting things that hurt kids once they are out of the womb (farmworkers kids with pesticides all over the world, child slaves on the coffee platiations and chocolate plantations in Africa, less-advantaged minority populations here in the states who continue to suffer under zoning that means they get hit with the industrial waste that rich folk don't) ... it not only doesn't make sense, I can't figure out how it's moral.
If you want to buy a less-environmentally-friendly something or other, the corporation building it should be damn well legally required to not mess up the environment building or selling or growing it. You (and I) the consumer should pay the real cost. Then we'll see what happens to their stinking profits, and the retirement plans of everyone who chooses to ignore the greater good and hands them their money. Since when is it a good idea to pay someone you clearly, evidentially can't trust with basic decency to "take care of you"?
We are not only letting corporations screw the rest of us over "for profit," we are PAYING them (through govt subsidies and stock investments) to do so!!!
We don't have capitalism here, we have an economic oligarchy which keeps its control via an entreched power structure that can be traced back to the time of the Constitution (and of course back into Europe as well).
(As a side note, I am leery of this hybrid-car thing, as I am leery of computers ushering in the great "environmentally friendly" paperless age, because of the huge amount of poisonous nastiness involved in the design, testing, manufacture, use, and eventual disposal of anything involving computer hardware. I hope over the long run it's better overall ... ! )
There, Gino, can't complain I never visit your blog ;).
Luv ya :).
--K :).
Holy smokes a fellow traveler!
Way off topic...anybody else having problems with thegulch.net also?
but kal, she's a hippie chick from portland.
the kind you see at Tull concerts.
I think I'm in love...
she'll be back in about 5 days.
shall i offer an intro?
maybe i could build you up? explain how you make your living as an professional enviro nanny-stater?
hey now, you guys ;), I'm married, strict Catholic (except the cussing--there I'm just "culturally" Catholic ;) ), and not currently planning on filing for an annulment ... and I'm too young to have attended a Tull concert (although 1967-1970 is probably my fav music until the mid-90s ... I think I might have liked punk if I wasn't around 6 at the time ;) ... )
Gino, I usually check back more often when I leave comments ... especially potentially inflammatory ones ;).
Kal, I popped over to the post in question and was going to leave a comment but I see your blog only accepts Blogger-folk
but it will work here too
(folks who haven't read over there, there is a back and forth about whether corporations have rights)
---
1) Gino, didn't you just recently make a point about how you choose to use all CFLs?
2) i dont remember, and i am old enough to, society up in arms about what form deodorant takes
this was a pretty funny pun
3) corporate "rights" need a serious reeval, since they seem to have used their legal "rights," which properly should be dependent on individuals' God given rights, to completely disenfranchise individuals from the possibility of informed moral choice, and to completely divest themselves of actual moral responsibility (in the name of "profits" or "the investors" ... that last is so lovely, because it shows how they've tricked us into screwing ourselves over)
legal rights are a WHOLE different thing than fundamental rights, and eventually someone needs to smack the system around and rewrite for livability (short and long term)
I'm with Kal that the market can correct its damn self if people are educated (ie, are personally responsible) and the baddies (people and corporations) are legally required to not demonstrably screw people over ("required" includes effective consequences)--the lightbulb manufacturers, like the car manufacturers, eventually seem to be grokking that holding the old line merely screws them over in the long run (God please the bioengineered crops folks fall soon ...)
people ARE the environment, see, is the thing. Things that kill frogs in Minnesota (acid rain, 1980s) just take a little longer to kill us, since we are, after bears, the ultimate onmivores. Or, in the case of our current catastrophic loss of the bees (Kal's post, also recently featured on PBS), perhaps it won't take much time after all ...
(of course, since honeybees were introduced to the Americas from Europe, it's probably just a sign from God that we should grow native plants instead of nasty bioengineered or imported ones that require non-native pollinators ;) )
Ach, I'm an idiot. I fixed the comment issue (a friend of mine's been telling me it's been like that for months, but I've been lazy to actually look into it).
And I don't think my wife or priest would be down with an annulment either, KR.
KR, have you read "Crunchy Con" by Rod Dreher? I'm about 3/4ths through it and it's given me hope that my fellow Republicans can be shown the light on environmental issues.
I think it may be too late for Gino, though.
(Actually, Gino's a hunter, and hunters are great conservationists. He's just also a might crap-stirrer and enjoys getting these discussions going...)
conservationist:yes.
enviro earth worshipper wacko:no
the difference is that i dont try to force others to live as i do.
and why i will soon flee CA for rural lands, and hopefully buy some of my own.
as for the comment issue: i think you and i are the only ones who dont have 'word' verification. i hate that feature.
you DO know that swirlie bulbs are not as good light producers as traditional bulbs, right? and they contain mercury to poison the earth after disposal?
I hate word verification. Just another thing to screw up after I spent ten minutes on a particularly witty or insightful comment.
(Yes, I do sometimes have witty or insightful comments)
As to compact fluorescents, it's a little bit of mercury, and they're working on taking it out.
(And traditional lightbulbs have tungsten, which is dangerous in the groundwater too. And with CFLs you use so many fewer bulbs that it's still a good trade-off. Afterall, Mercury is found in the emissions of coal-fired powerplants too)
And as to "good" light producers, they're getting better all the time.
You know, KR's right, you've admitted you use CFL's, you're not fooling anyone, Mr. Al Gore Jr...
Mr. Al Gore Jr...
ah, and Gino of course is the flame-instigator ;)
Gino: Yes, CFLs have vaporized mercury and suckier light ... theoretically the local haz-mat drop off site is supposed to do some capture-disposal thing when I drop them off (but I suspect they just bust them still :P). I use a mix in the house, myself, and am careful to not destroy the bulbs. I take the CFLs in to hazmat when I take my batteries in. And I pay ($5/load) to recycle my styrofoam, so yes, I am probably a certifiable enviro-freak.
Kal: Nah, I know Gino is conservationist ... I just think he can take it one further ;). (Just like we all can, eh?) I know he really cares about people, is the thing (even if they irritate the crap out of him) ... it is just a small step, after all ... everybody's doing it ;) ...
the difference is that i dont try to force others to live as i do.
now now, I am just trying to guilt everyone into it!
but if I am ever elected to office (in all my spare time ha ha), you can bet I'll be co-sponsoring subsidies for organic agriculture and non-carbon energy development, and voting down subsidies for anything that purposely involves poison
to turn your own anti-abortion-regulation argument at Kal's aginst you, Gino, it isn't my observation that corporations (or most people) will take care of the little people (kids, minorities, etc) without regulation and enforcement ... protecting people (and, yes, bees and frogs) from poison etc. seems to me just another defense of the weak against the strong (and therefore under your justification a legitimate target for govt regulation)
remeber that all poisons affect children geometrically more than they affect adults in the same environmental concentrations (the docs keep saying this is because kids are smaller, which I think makes no sense, and I am no scientific dim bulb; I think it is because they are actively growing, and the smaller they ar the faster they are growing--sucking up and incorporating the stuff arond them)
the strong have historically in these cases raped society and the environment and then declared bankruptcy to avoid paying anyone back/paying anyone at all (my neighbor uses his vets' benefits to get oxygen for the blacklung the defunct coalmine didn't pay for--taxpayers screwed again, workers and environment screwed--but what the hell, we had some cheap coal for a while and all got addicted to massive electricity use! woo hoo!)
people are being actively hurt, and the perps are both conscious of it and refuse to admit that they bear financial responsibility--but they claim "rights" to all the financial benefits
I cannot see the logic in permitting this?
once again, using subsidies is forcing me to pay for something i may not want to buy, in effect forcing it on me.
i oppose all subsidies.
my dream world is a world where Kal is unemployed.
gee... with all these evilnastyselfish corps running around wantonly killing children, how the hell did i, or either of you two, survive to adulthood?
dont know bout you, but i just stayed clear of moving cars, and the rest was easy.
Hey, 1/3 of my generation was legally aborted, mister.
And your generation is dying of cancer at rates that are just stupid. I see NOTHING about cancer death of people in their 40s and 50s being even vaguely natural.
We are dying. It's just handy for the moneygrubbers that either people have been brainwashed into not caring (abortion) or take so long to die the corporation has cashed out first or can claim "too many variables" (yep, too many OTHER corporations pouring poison and mutagens probably have muddled the data--more reasons why they should ALL be required to pay the cleanup costs up front).
So there ; Phbbbbttt.
(There was a recent set of studies showing that kids who ate 100% organic were the only ones who did not have neurotoxin pesticides in their systems ... and the other kids often had levels higher than what even the govt declares safe. Whether or not they are killed, these kids are being damaged.)
I am also generally against subsidies. Except temporarily, for good causes ;). Reasonable sunset clauses must be included, and they must be hard to renew. Mostly I consider them R&D funds. Perhaps I'll just recast my funding as R&D. That certainly would make it harder to renew indefinitely!
Of course, like abortion, regulating is the "easy" fix that isn't really a fix, it's a bandaid (albeit an important, life-saving one)--we have to reeducate the consumers (er, people) to value human life. Or they will find ways to buy cheater products, merely moving the crises elsewhere (and giving people around the world more reasons to resent us).
More reasons to take apart the current school system. (It's all connected, see ;). )
PS the pesticides-in-kids studies were done because the first study surprised the scientists; they weren't expecting high concentrations, and the single all-organic kid was included more or less accidentally. (The first study was only 10 kids, a basic exploratory test.)
That kid coming up clean led to a larger study that confirmed that the first results weren't a fluke.
Also that if a kid thenm is switched to all-organic their bodies clear the toxins within I think it was 6 weeks. It's like smoking; once you stop the body can clean up an amazing amount; years of data are clear that your chances of dying from a smoking-related disease decrease exponentially the longer you stay away from smoking.
Which is why folks in their 40s shouldn't be dying of cancer. And why stopping poisoning as much as possible as fast as possible is not just a feel-good hippie ideal. It's an effective action.
PLUS, and this won't really "worry" you I suspect, but it is interesting,
men in Europe are losing fertility ... the numbers I've seen are something like 1/3 of men are now infertile; I saw one article from Britain that suggested it was more like 70% that were either fertility-challenged (my word, not theirs) or infertile. The govts of course are "mystified."
The alternative press pegs it on the artificial phytoestrogens used to grow crops ... which not only end up in and on the crops but in the watertable, of course.
now there is a dilemma for lets-live-like-indians enviros.
too many folks kill the earth.
to much poison kills people.
we need to get rid of the people, and the poisons....
but how,now?
cant save the damn earth for trying,.
LOL
love it.
oh yeah, dear,...
folks are living much longer raising the possibilty of succumbing to cancer when all other traditioanl deadlies have failed.
its not that hard.
i argued this is jr high.
something will kill you, eventually.
uh uh, Gino, I'm not buying it
my parents' generation is dying of cancer before their parents' generation
when the grandparents get cancer, they respond to treatment faster and are less likely to die of any given episode--they also get "normal" cancers, like prostate, not deadly weird untreatable ones, like pancreatic; they get predictable cancers, like lung cancer (they've earned that, eh?), not cancers that require long names (non-Hodgkins lymphoma of type x y or z) because they've only recently been showing up in numbers that they could be defined.
cancers that used to be "70 year old cancers" are becoming cancers of middle age; cancers that used to be middle-age cancers are showing up in 20 year olds
(the 20 year old thing, though, is maybe more prevalent in females, and I have no problem attributing it to a variety of unsafe sexual-revolution medical interventions instead of pesticides)
your jr high argument is pretty on the surface, but doesn't match what I see happening and what research I've seen ... I argued a lot of things in jr high that made surface sense, but I'm a big girl now
(Sorry. 'Had to tag you back for "dear" ... and implying I am being stupid ;). I don't object to affection-names, if they play to my strengths. "Dear" just cannot sound like anything except someone patting the other on the head.)
now that's my kind of put-down, subtle,yet there, without blatent namecalling.
;).
Luv ya.
And I still think catering to big business is the source of all unhappiness in America today ;).
See, this is why I haven't been commenting; kr makes my case better than I can...
My dream world is also one where I am unemployed, but because we are living sustainably and there is no more need for folks to prod the policy makers in the right direction.
kal:yeah, she's pretty smart for girl...
((ducks))
kr has handed my ass to me before, but she's smarter than me.
Aww, Gino, that's sweet. I didn't know you thought I was winning ;). I wouldn't bother trying to hand your ass to you if I didn't think you were a worthwhile sparring partner.
Kal, thanks for the compliment. I look forward to seeing more of you here; my time constraints (better known as my kids) limit my blog-surfing. Gino's is one of only four I keep regular track of right now, and since Andy is off his theology kick I really haven't been commenting anywhere except here.
I haven't read the book you mentioned earlier (in fact hadn't heard of it), but am always glad to run into another granola conservative (I assume "crunchy con" derives from that 1990s nickname ;) ). Like you, I keep hoping moral/economic conservatives will logic their way into environmentalism ... for the world and not just their own backyards, as both morally and economically the world is the stage upon which we play now.
At least the evangelicals are starting to come around, in line with their transforming social agendas, and parts of the Catholic heirarchy are applying the legalities and theological logic to the new concept of limited and fundamentally communal resources ...
have you read, speaking of books, Trashing The Planet, by dixie lee ray? or is ray lee? ...
i think its dixie ray lee... anyway, something like that. i know i got the title right.
this book has done more to inform my thinking, and made me suspicious of enviro claims,than 12yrs of eco-indoctrination in the school system.
The GOP let the left steal the environmental issue from them, just like a lot of other things. It was Teddy Roosevelt who started saving wetlands, even though they weren't called that yet; and it was Richard Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency.
The environment is -or was - or should be - a "conservative" issue. It used to be. But they gave it to the looney left, and now we have total idiots making sense. That's why life is so confusing!
any populist issue will be stolen by the left.
conservatism is, or should be, by nature, wary of govt intervention.
the socialist left has no qualms with dicating the lives of others. it is what they do, and exactly what they promise to do.
a commen sense approach, as outlined heavily in the book i mentioned, is too hard to soundbite and explain to a dumbed down public at large.that is the problem.
the conservationist always gets outscreamed by the preservationist, and is on constant defense.
you can win on defense.
RW--yes. Both parties have a stake in keeping Americans inflamed and unthinking. "Letting" the lefties have the environment issue is probably exactly what happened, strategically. The parties suck.
We need new voices. I think even despite horrendous "schooling" and a banal media culture, Americans have more sense than the two-party system lets us show.
Gino--well, noone would ever say I'm any good at soundbites. But I don't think that needs to put us on the defensive.
We just have to go for tenacity, I think.
Or speak a million miles a minute to get all the points in, which is my real-life solution. People either follow it (and it's usually good stuff) or feel so overwhelmed they give up ;).
Every once in a while I have to bludgeon someone to death (Anonymous at LC's, for instance).
I once called a stick-in-the-mud national talk show and got three pertinent alternative-thought points (about birth and babies) in before the host realised he should shut me down. It was a beautiful thing.
And no, I haven't read that book either.
Does it cover the as-yet-unmentioned dangers of removing energy from the atmosphere (windmills) and oceans (tidal power)? Hydropower was supposed to be "harmless," too. And of course most solar panels involve, last I heard, the same set of poisonous materials computers do.
Just to show I'm not an unthinking environmentalist ;).
the book talks about extreme claims intended to scare, and how certain studies are blown way out of proportion for political gain.
she was an enviromentalist herself, who saw the things in more of a costs vs benefits view, and how much safety was too much to pay for when there was no reasonable benefit to be had.
basically, a common sense aproach to enviromentalism.
Ok Gino, we've exhausted this topic. Where's the latest obscure foreign movie review/picture of comely lass?
Afterall, that's what we all come here for.
will have to wait and see what releases this friday.
last week's flicks seemed to be either a little to estrogenated or navel-centric for my preference.
fun blog. thanks for sharing:)
33 comments! Holy cow! Well, just thought I put in my 2cents but I'm too lazy to read all previous remarks so I guess not:o)
hm..I'd think most of us are concerned about the Earth. It's just how far do we take it? Either way, unless we're doing deliberate harm to others, liberty should be paramount. And the more responsible citizens are, the less the govt has excuse to intervene and interfere.
Hey, Gino, got your email addy now, gulch is still down, and I think I'll look into a 'free' discussion board, if anyone is interested. Still....no one has showed up at PaperExpo....so maybe no one really cares?
Trisha
ox
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