Voting Guides - Nov 2008

Voting guides for 2008/11/04 - progressive leaning:

• Calitics - http://www.calitics.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=7111
  
• The League of Pissed Off Young Voters PAC - http://theballot.org/2008/sf
• San Francisco Bike Coalition - http://www.sfbike.org/?vote08
• San Francisco Bay Guardian - http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=7257
  

Staying a Step Ahead of Aging

Dr. Vonda Wright, a 40-year-old runner, decided to study people who kept training as they got older or began competing in middle age. She wanted to know what happens to them and at what age does performance start to decline.

Their results are surprising, even to many of the researchers themselves. The investigators find that while you will slow down as you age, you may be able to stave off more of the deterioration than you thought. Researchers also report that people can start later in life — one man took up running at 62 and ran his first marathon, a year later, in 3 hours 25 minutes.

It’s a testament to how adaptable the human body is, researchers said, that people can start serious training at an older age and become highly competitive. It also is testament to their findings that some physiological factors needed for a good performance are not much affected by age.

Read more ...

Scientists blame ocean dead zones on climate change

Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.

Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing - a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.

"We couldn't believe our eyes," Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. "It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died."

Read more...

Poverty Is Poison

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

Read more...

Super Tuesday 2008

Voting Guides for 2008/02/05:

• SF Bicycle Coalition votes YES on Prop A
• Speak Out California
• San Francisco Bay Guardian
• League of Young Voters PAC

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler

Livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation. If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20% it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to an ultra-efficient Prius.

[...]

A sea change in the consumption of a resource that Americans take for granted may be in store — something cheap, plentiful, widely enjoyed and a part of daily life. And it isn’t oil.

It’s meat.

The two commodities share a great deal: Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.

Read more...

The Real McDonalds

Tell it like it is at http://ronaldmchummer.com/

Hair and mushrooms create a recipe for cleaning up oily beaches

A group of guerrilla volunteers is cleaning oil from San Francisco's beaches using an unorthodox, albeit totally organic, method: human hair and mushrooms.

Using mats made of hair, they are absorbing the droplets of oil that have washed ashore since a cargo ship rammed the base of a Bay Bridge tower last week, spilling 58,000 gallons of fuel.

Hair, which naturally absorbs oil from air and water, acts as a perfect sponge, said Lisa Gautier of San Francisco, who provided 1,000 hair mats. They are about the size of a doormat, tightly woven with dark hair, and feel somewhat like an S.O.S pad.

While the mats may not be the obvious choice among hazardous waste experts, they hit San Francisco's green chord: More than 700 volunteers have tried them in recent days. Organizers hope their success will inspire more ecological responses to toxic waste removal.
Read more ...

US Emits 8.2 Tons of CO2 per person

A study of the world's power stations has shown the extent to which developed countries produce more carbon dioxide per head than emerging economies.

Australians were found to be the world's worst polluters per capita, producing five times as much CO2 from generating power as China.

The US came second with eight tonnes of the greenhouse gas per head - 16 times more than that produced by India.

The US also produced the most CO2 in total, followed by China.

The Carbon Monitoring for Action (Carma) website is the first global inventory of emissions and looks at 50,000 power stations.

Its data was compiled by the Center for Global Development, a US think-tank.

Read more...

Voting 2006

For once, I'm not going to rant about Fanatican malfeasanse. :-) Several friends have asked me about the voting guides I used for tomorrow's vote, so here they are:

1. Speak Out California - http://speakoutca.org/now/2006general.php - Jenny sent me this one and it's a quick overview of all the major issues. However, it's lacking details at the city and county level.
2. San Francisco Bicycle Coalition - http://www.sfbike.org/?vote - there are three recommendations that affected me as a daily bicycle commuter. So I went with them there.
3. San Francisco Bay Guardian - http://tinyurl.com/steoh - very comprehensive endorsement pages. They include a non-legalese explanation of each candidate and proposition. The downside is that you have to read through a lot of things. We voted via Absentee ballots so we took our time wading through all of it.

This is the first time we voted absentee (though we didn't leave town) and I'm now a big fan. I have the ballots in front of me and can take my time reading through all the cruft. It's leisurely and I feel that I'm voting responsibly and in a well-informed manner. Moreover, I don't have to change my schedule on voting day to go to a polling place. Just note two things:

1. Your absentee ballot has to arrive by 8:00 PM on voting day. If you haven't mailed it ahead of time, you can hand deliver it to your polling place.
2. If you're hand delivering for someone else (e.g., spouse, parents, children), they have to sign an extra spot in the back of the envelope that authorizes someone else to deliver for them.

Lastly, PLEASE VOTE. Not only is it your civic responsibility - e.g., driving sober, paying taxes, etc - it's your personal responsibility to yours, your children's, and your community's future.

Caesar and Bush

A blog commenter compares Julius Caesar and George W. Bush in a comment to this main blog entry: Blame for Iraq Extends Far Beyond the GOP (good read, by the way). In short, the commenter writes:

Julius Caesar was an ambitious, vainglorious, would-be tyrant. George W Bush is a modest and self-deprecating one.

Hee hee.

Gonorrhea Lectim

This came through the mail recently...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior.

The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him." Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past four years. Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing behavior. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a single bush found in Texas.

Republicans Steal Another $22 Billion

According to this International Herald Tribune article, the Fanaticans have stolen another $22 Billion from the U.S. public.

To be fair, $22 Billion divided over 220 million taxpayers* comes to only $100 a person - which is chump change when compared to the $2 Trillion [!!!] that the Iraq Debacle (or is that Bush Quagmire) will end up costing the U.S. public.

I know what you're gonna say: the $2 Trillion is worth it. The reasons are summarized in this video from the 2004 Republican National Convention in NYC.

[*] The U.S. probably does not have 220 million taxpayers, but this over-estimate makes it easy to do the math in your head.

An Equation for Our Times

Being passed around via email...

Another Republican Culture of Corruption Episode

ABC News reports on yet another corrupt Republican:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a California Republican, pleaded guilty on Monday to felony conspiracy and tax evasion for taking money from a defense contractor in exchange for help in securing Defense Department contracts.

What a surprise! Not. (Related stories from Google)

Eat, Sleep, Work, Consume, Die

Hey, life now is no different than the early 1850's - ya eat, sleep, work, consume, and die.

Civilization took a definite nose dive when the merchant princes grew ascendant at the expense of the artists and thinkers; when the notion of liberté, égalité, fraternité gave way to "I've got mine; screw you" (an attitude that existed in Voltaire's day, too, you might recall, with unfortunate results for the blue bloods). In the Big Picture, the dead white guys -- Rousseau, Thoreau, Mill -- cared a lot more about your well-being than the live ones like Gates or Jobs or Ellison ever will.

Though for what it's worth, at least Gates Sr has spoken out for the Estate Tax: Dozens of the Wealthy Join to Fight Estate Tax Repeal (more search results).

Out of a Bad Spy Novel

From an Op-Ed column in the Washington Post about the secret American jail in other countries:

Our ideals are the heart and soul of this nation. We are not an ancient nation united by language or blood. Our ideals, rather than ethnicity or even territory, hold us together and make us a nation. When we betray those ideals, we weaken America.

In other words, giving up our ideals to fight the terrorists just hands the victory to them.

Here's a cached copy if the original article expires.

Our Brilliant Prezidunt

I'm astounded how out of touch our brilliant prezidunt is:

I had an interesting opportunity to go see some research and development being done on solar energy. I'm convinced, someday in the relative near future we'll be able to have units on our houses that will be able to power electronics within our houses, and hopefully, with excess energy, be able to feed them back in the system. That's possible. We're not there yet, but it's coming.

This is just embarrassing. Reminds me of his dad being amazed at a supermarket price scanner. A gadfly on the AEZ mailing list comments:

He's just misunderestimating the advancementization of solarifying that stuff to make that other stuff.

The full text of his speech is at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051004-1.html (I'm not going to dignify it by a live link).

Bush: One of the Worst Disasters to hit the U.S.

Unfortunately, the reality is not as funny as the photo.

Fanaticans

Shorthand for:

Fanatic Right Wing Republicans