Our Descent Into Madness

Yep, I just watched Who Killed the Electric Car? (finally- am I late or what?) and wow…Wow.

First of all…did you know that some of the first cars were electric? I’d thought they were only a recent concept, but no…they’ve been around about a century. About a month ago Daisy pointed out to me that scientists had linked humans and emissions to global warming as early as the ’30’s, and now this.

Also, the White House was once equipped with solar panels! During the Carter administration, anyway. As soon as Reagan gained control he disposed of them. Stupid.

Not to mention all of the shady behavior actually featured and focused on in the movie.

Ugh.

Arghhh.

Ahh.

All that said, it’s an excellent documentary…don’t let my less-than-optimistic mood discourage you from watching it. There’s much to be learned.

Pam Spaulding made this for you! She urges you to ask the marriage equality question of all candidates running for political office.

I found this on Pandagon, but you can read more of Pam’s stuff over at Pam’s House Blend.

From WorldChanging:

As the year draws to a close and we begin speculating on the coming year, this rising tide begs the question: now that light bulbs have illuminated over so many capable heads, What’s next? What needs to be done in 2007? What worldchanging tool, model or idea should we be watching (or hoping to see emerge) in 2007? What key piece of knowledge do we need? What action must we take? What do we do now?

For this week, we’ve asked some of our most respected allies, team members and friends to write a short response to this question. From today through Saturday, we’ll be sharing their answers with you on the site, in a series of posts titled with their names. We hope you enjoy hearing what they have to say, and if you’re inspired to share your own visions for what’s next, please do so in the comments.

The responses focus on various aspects of public policy, environment/sustainability, and info-sharing- what WorldChanging is all about, if you aren’t familiar with it. All of the entries I’ve read so far are great. Worth checking out.

Australia’s Prime Minister is upset because in Australia, consumption of bottled water has doubled in just the past six years. Kids are drinking this instead of flouridated tap water and their teeth are rotting.

In a plea to parents to get their children to drink tap water instead of bottled water, Mr Howard described the worsening tooth decay epidemic as a national tragedy.

“I think one of the things we have to try and do though, is get young kids to drink tap water again to do something about their teeth,” Mr Howard told The Sun-Herald. “It’s a real tragedy this. You’re starting to see the re-emergence of decay in young kids.”

Figures released earlier this month showed that one child in every five aged five years and under gets at least one filling or more when they go to the dentist, with just 12 per cent of under-fives going to the dentist yearly. And 38 per cent of 10 to 16-year-olds are also getting at least one filling with each trip to the dentist.

Of course, tooth decay is only one of the many serious problems created by the bottled water industry. The most obvious and probably the most important problem it poses, I’d say, is the fact that water is a finite resource necessary to all life (human and non) and the privatization of this resource ensures favoritism in distribution. And, of course, this dynamic encompasses all marketing of all resources. But, as a person with regular access to drinkable water, I forget how fast we’re running out of it (not just in certain impoverished and desertified countries, but globally) and I assume that most people with regular access to drinkable water are similarly blind about this advantage. So let’s take another look at the problem.

The World Bank predicts that two-thirds of the world’s population will run short of adequate water in the next 20 years. You might think that the sheer scariness of this scarcity would prompt policy makers to focus on such goals as protecting the purity of the water we have, pushing rational conservation, and promoting the long-term public interest in this irreplaceable resource.

Speculators look at the looming scarcity of a substance that no one can do without and think: “Wow, if I could control that, I could make a killing.” Suddenly, the unsexy task of piping in water and piping out sewage became a hot prospect.

And there you have it, basically. It’s simple, tired, and ever worsening. Food and Water Watch is a good resource if you’re feeling uninformed or helpless. Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke is staring up at me from my floor, so maybe after I’ve read it I’ll have more to say on the subject.

The Greatest Collection of Neo-Conservative Music Ever Assembled! 

Fun. I’m glad that some people have a lot of free time and choose to spend it making things like this.

And, if you’re feeling so inclined, you should also watch Pappa’s Got a Brand New Baghdad. Haha.

Daniel Levitin, once a musician and a music producer, is now a cognitive psychologist in charge of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University in Montreal. He realizes that peoples’ brains are highly adept at recognizing music, and wants to know why.

This summer he published “This Is Your Brain on Music” (Dutton), a layperson’s guide to the emerging neuroscience of music. Dr. Levitin is an unusually deft interpreter, full of striking scientific trivia. For example we learn that babies begin life with synesthesia, the trippy confusion that makes people experience sounds as smells or tastes as colors. Or that the cerebellum, a part of the brain that helps govern movement, is also wired to the ears and produces some of our emotional responses to music. His experiments have even suggested that watching a musician perform affects brain chemistry differently from listening to a recording.

I have not read This is Your Brain on Music, but I’d definitely like to at some point.

Scientifically, Dr. Levitin’s colleagues credit him for focusing attention on how music affects our emotions, turf that wasn’t often covered by previous generations of psychoacousticians, who studied narrower questions about how the brain perceives musical sounds. “The questions he asks are very very musical, very concerned with the fact that music is an art that we interact with, not just a bunch of noises,” said Rita Aiello, an adjunct professor in the department of psychology at New York University.

Ultimately, scientists say, his work offers a new way to unlock the mysteries of the brain: how memory works, how people with autism think, why our ancestors first picked up instruments and began to play, tens of thousands of years ago.

Cool.

The world’s oldest newspaper (Sweden’s Post-och Inrikes Tidningar, publishing since 1645!) has announced plans to go completely digital. If you can read Swedish, check it out.

Here’s my question: are they using green power to run those computers??

The Pentagon is getting ready to request about 100 billion dollars to use in Iraq, Afghanistan, “and elsewhere.” If Congress approves, we will have set an annual record for war-related spending.

About $50 billion — most of the money — would go to the Army, which is conducting the bulk of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The request also includes $3.8 billion for the Air Force and $3 billion for the Navy to buy or upgrade aircraft. Both services have argued in recent months that they need to replace planes used in combat operations.

Altogether, the four military services would receive $26.6 billion for “reconstitution,” a term that the memorandum said covered repair and replacement of equipment damaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Along with the $50 billion already provided this year, that is more than double what Congress appropriated in 2006.

If we’re going to be sending people into war, then I’m all for making sure they have the equipment they need to stay as safe as possible, given the circumstances, but we’ve definitely spent enough money that that should have been taken care of by now, right? Right. Obviously, the government’s top priority has not been taking care of our soldiers. And what is this “elsewhere” crap? Of course, others are skeptical too.

“There is a real question about how much of this is really related to the war,” said Steve Kosiak, a defense budget expert with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington policy analysis group.

The Pentagon is also seeking $9.7 billion for training Iraqi and Afghan security forces, almost as much as has been spent in total since 2001, according to a study by the Congressional Research Service. In a reflection of the worsening security situation in Afghanistan, more than half of the requested money would go to training the country’s army and police forces.

Hmm. But:

“No one seems to be saying we’re going to make deep cuts in war-related expenditures,” he said. “I don’t see evidence that the Democrats are interested in cutting this.”

It’s true. The former Iraqi president was hanged in Baghdad at 10:05 eastern standard time.

My father says, “I find that–not really anything to celebrate.”

I’m ambivalent. It’s bad to kill people, but come on. What are we going to do? Make his victims’ families feed him with their tax dollars? Wait for someone to try to break him out of jail? And at the same time, of course, it’s simple: killing is bad.

So let’s not celebrate.

Edit: There’s a Salon article up about this, by one Juan Cole. Worth your while.

One thing is certain: The trial and execution of Saddam were about revenge, not justice. Instead of promoting national reconciliation, this act of revenge helped Saddam portray himself one last time as a symbol of Sunni Arab resistance, and became one more incitement to sectarian warfare.

A recent poll shows that:

Haha, hahaha.

And as Joe Scarborough said, “You don’t have to have a political doctorate in Political Science to realize it’s never a good sign when you’re outpolled by Lucifer.”

Via Shakespeare’s Sister.