Archive for April, 2006
Now that the President is again touting Ethanol, and we are getting it in our gas, it’s time to remember that Ethanol is not [even part of] the solution to the energy crisis. After all, Ethanol takes more energy to produce it than it generates. Yes, that’s right, it takes more energy [fossil fuel] to make Ethanol than you get when you burn it. [See: Cornell ecologist's study finds that producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy]
In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production, the study found that:
* corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
* switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced; and
* wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel production, the study found that:
* soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced, and
* sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.
In assessing inputs, the researchers considered such factors as the energy used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer, running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix. Although additional costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to consumers and the costs associated with environmental pollution or degradation, these figures were not included in the analysis.
“The United State desperately needs a liquid fuel replacement for oil in the near future,” says Pimentel, “but producing ethanol or biodiesel from plant biomass is going down the wrong road, because you use more energy to produce these fuels than you get out from the combustion of these products.”
Although Pimentel advocates the use of burning biomass to produce thermal energy (to heat homes, for example), he deplores the use of biomass for liquid fuel. “The government spends more than $3 billion a year to subsidize ethanol production when it does not provide a net energy balance or gain, is not a renewable energy source or an economical fuel. Further, its production and use contribute to air, water and soil pollution and global warming,” Pimentel says. He points out that the vast majority of the subsidies do not go to farmers but to large ethanol-producing corporations.
Ethanol is such an American “solution” to our energy problems. It generates enormous profits for the corn production and distribution industry [not for farmers] and is worth less than nothing
April 26th, 2006
As many must know by now, his new album is entitled Living With War and contains a song Let’s Impeach the President. Now you can hear Neil express his thoughts on Showbiz Tonight. Well worth a listen as he responds to right-wing attacks.
April 24th, 2006
The Internet is under threat from Congress who wants to hand over the keys to private companies. Daily Kos has an excellent explanation of what their up to and what’s at stake: We Need You to Save the Internet! Read it and act before its too late!
April 24th, 2006
Jane Smiley pens some advice and comments to those conservatives newly joining the anti-Bush forces as they witness his disastrous failures. [Notes for Converts] She is unsparing in her comments, taking on the moral vacuity of the conservatives and not foregiving them their role in creating the America of racism, greed, ignorance, and authoritarianism that is America today.
A few excerpts:
1. Bush doesn’t know you disagree with him. Nothing about you makes you of interest to George W. Bush once you no longer agree with and support him. No degree of relationship (father, mother, etc.), no longstanding friendly intercourse (Jack Abramoff), no degree of expertise (Brent Scowcroft), no essential importance (Tony Blair, American voters) makes any difference. There is nothing you have to offer that makes Bush want to know you once you have come to disagree with him. Your opinions and feelings now exist in a world entirely external to the mind of George W. Bush….
3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a “sense of entitlement”. Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He’s never had to before this….
Tyranny is your creation. What we have today is the natural and inevitable outcome of ideas and policies you have promoted for the last generation. I once knew a guy who was still a Marxist in 1980. Whenever I asked him why Communism had failed in Russia and China, he said “Mistakes were made”. He could not believe that Marxism itself was at fault, just as you cannot believe that the ideology of the unregulated free market has created the world we live in today. You are tempted to say: “Mistakes have been made”, but in fact, psychologically and sociologically, no mistakes have been made. The unregulated free market has operated to produce a government in its own image. In an unregulated free market, for example, cheating is merely another sort of advantage that, supposedly, market forces might eventually “shake out” of the system. Of course, anyone with common sense understands that cheaters do damage that sometimes cannot be repaired before they are “shaken out”, but according to the principles of the unregulated free market, the victims of that sort of damage are just out of luck and the damage that happens to them is just a sort of “culling”. It is no accident that our government is full of cheaters–they learned how to profit from cheating when they were working in corporations that were using bribes, perks, and secret connections to cheat their customers of good products, their neighbors of healthy environmental conditions, their workers of workplace safety and decent paychecks. It was only when the corporations began cheating their shareholders that any of you squealed….
And then there was the way you used racism and religious intolerance to gain and hold onto power. Nixon was cynical about it–taking the party of Lincoln and reaching out to disaffected southern racists, drumming up a backlash against the Civil Rights movement for the sake of votes, but none of you has been any less vicious. Racism might have died an unlamented death in this country, but you kept it alive with phrases like “welfare queen” and your resistance to affirmative action and taxation for programs to help people in our country with nothing, or very little. You opted not to take the moral high ground and recognize that the whole nation would be better off without racism, but rather to increase class divisions and racial divisions for the sake of your own comfort, pleasure, and profit. You have used religion in exactly the same way….
Your ideas and your policies have promoted selfishness, greed, short-term solutions, bullying, and pain for others. You have looked in the faces of children and denied the existence of a “common good”. You have disdained and denied the idea of “altruism”. At one time, our bureaucracy was full of people who had gone into government service or scientific research for altruistic reasons–I knew, because I knew some of them. You have driven them out and replaced them with vindictive ignoramuses…. ou have increased the powers of corporations at the expense of every other sector in the nation and actively defied any sort of regulation that would require these corporations to treat our world with care and respect. You have made economic growth your deity, and in doing so, you have accelerated the power of the corporations to destroy the atmosphere, the oceans, the ice caps, the rainforests, and the climate….
Now you are fleeing him, but it’s only because he’s got the earmarks of a loser. Your problem is that you don’t know why he’s losing. You think he’s made mistakes. But no. He’s losing because the ideas that you taught him and demonstrated for him are bad ideas, self-destructive ideas, and even suicidal ideas. And they are immoral ideas. You should be ashamed of yourselves because not only have your ideas not worked to make the world a better place, they were inhumane and cruel to begin with, and they have served to cultivate and excuse the inhumane and cruel character traits of those who profess them.
Make sure to read the entire article .
April 24th, 2006
I’ve been trying to get the time to write a longer entry on a recent Washington Post article on potential drug company influence in the writing of DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, produced by the American Psychiatric Association. [Experts Defining Mental Disorders Are Linked to Drug Firms] It seems that many of the experts on the various panels that wrote it received money from drug companies. On some of the workgroups 100% of the members received drug money. This raises questions of potential bias. In fairness, it is important to note that some of the writers only received drug company money after their work on DSM-IV.
Of the 170 experts in all who contributed to the manual that defines disorders from personality problems to drug addiction, more than half had such ties, including 100 percent of the experts who served on work groups on mood disorders and psychotic disorders. The analysis did not reveal the extent of their relationships with industry or whether those ties preceded or followed their work on the manual.
“I don’t think the public is aware of how egregious the financial ties are in the field of psychiatry,” said Lisa Cosgrove, a clinical psychologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, who is publishing her analysis today in the peer-reviewed journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics….
Cosgrove said she began her research after discovering that five of six panel members studying whether certain premenstrual problems are a psychiatric disorder had ties to Eli Lilly & Co., which was seeking to market its drug Prozac to treat those symptoms.
I personally think direct bias in the form of drug company influence is less of a problem than is the narrow range of perspectives represented on these committees. Evidently those sectors of the mental health professions skeptical of the extent of drug treatment in our profession were not likely to be invited to the table when it came time to write the most influential work in our field, resulting in a narrowing of viewpoints regarding legitimate diagnoses and the nature of the criterion used to determine whether a particular diagnosis is present in a given patient.
If the larger problem is this form of indirect bias, then the proposed solution of financial disclosure is not likely to be of much help. We will discover that many of these experts receive drug company support, but what then? As long as this manual is central to our mental health system, helping determine which treatments will be reimbursed by insurance companies, or even allowed to be provided in many institutions, financial disclosure will do little to remediate the problem.
This finding provides yet another argument against our insane system of drug development by private drug companies. These companies are tasked to generate profits for their shareholders, not to further the public good. Is it therefore surprising that they do what they exist for and don’t do what isn’t in their mission?
April 23rd, 2006
As Iraq moves in a puritanical direction, the other expression of sexual repression is increasing. Time reports that there are an increasing number of Iraqi girls and women for sale to brothels, foreign and domestic. [The Missing Girls of Iraq]
The Organization for Women’s Freedom in Iraq, based in Baghdad, estimates from anecdotal evidence that more than 2,000 Iraqi women have gone missing in that period. A Western official in Baghdad who monitors the status of women in Iraq thinks that figure may be inflated but admits that sex trafficking, virtually nonexistent under Saddam, has become a serious issue.
The new Iraqi government is obstructing efforts to help these women:
“We have no one to protect us.” Women’s advocates are trying to set up halfway houses for kidnap survivors. The locations are secret to keep the women safe from both trafficking gangs trying to cover their tracks and outraged relatives who may try to kill the women to restore their clans’ reputation. But the new Iraqi government has set up several bureaucratic roadblocks. Even organizations that do not receive government money have to secure permission from four ministries and the Baghdad city council for every shelter they hope to operate. Wringing her hands in exasperation, activist Yanar Mohammed says, “They want to close our women’s shelter and deny our ability to open more.”
In the early stages of the occupation, a few CPA officials tried to help these girls, but these efforts were apparently abandoned. Now, as Iraq becomes an Islamic state, there is little hope in the short run.
April 23rd, 2006
Crooks and Liars has posted a video of Pink singing Dear Mr. President from her latest album. I’m Not Dead. “One of the most important songs I’ve ever written.”
Lyrics:
“Dear Mr. President”
(feat. Indigo Girls)
Dear Mr. President
Come take a walk with me
Let’s pretend we’re just two people and
You’re not better than me
I’d like to ask you some questions if we can speak honestly
What do you feel when you see all the homeless on the street
Who do you pray for at night before you go to sleep
What do you feel when you look in the mirror
Are you proud
How do you sleep while the rest of us cry
How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye
How do you walk with your head held high
Can you even look me in the eye
And tell me why
Dear Mr. President
Were you a lonely boy
Are you a lonely boy
Are you a lonely boy
How can you say
No child is left behind
We’re not dumb and we’re not blind
They’re all sitting in your cells
While you pave the road to hell
What kind of father would take his own daughter’s rights away
And what kind of father might hate his own daughter if she were gay
I can only imagine what the first lady has to say
You’ve come a long way from whiskey and cocaine
How do you sleep while the rest of us cry
How do you dream when a mother has no chance to say goodbye
How do you walk with your head held high
Can you even look me in the eye
Let me tell you bout hard work
Minimum wage with a baby on the way
Let me tell you bout hard work
Rebuilding your house after the bombs took them away
Let me tell you bout hard work
Building a bed out of a cardboard box
Let me tell you bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
You don’t know nothing bout hard work
Hard work
Hard work
Oh
How do you sleep at night
How do you walk with your head held high
Dear Mr. President
You’d never take a walk with me
Would you
[From: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pink/dearmrpresident.html]
Wonderful!
April 23rd, 2006
The right wing is totally obsessed about sex. The latest target is sex toys. A proposed South Carolina bill would make it a felony to sell devices for sexual stimulation. [Bill would make sale of sex toys illegal in South Carolina] Next will it be execution for watching Desperate Housewives?
Of course, sexual freedom, at least for married couples, has long been mainstream in this country.:
At Sugar ‘N Spice, sex toys are displayed in a separate room. Buyers include men and women who “need a little help” because surgery or medical problems are affecting their marriage, Ms. Irons said.
“We’ve been selling these sex toys for 27 years,” she said Friday. “Even pastors shop in here. They send couples in here they counsel for marriage problems. It’s probably going to hit people like that harder than people realize.”
It would be fascinating to figure out what’s going on in the minds of the folks who propose this nonsense, other than rank political opportunism, of course. They obviously are totally obsessed with sex. Likely, they are trying to control their own sexual urges by controlling those of others.
Like the anti-pornography campaigners of a not-so-long-gone era, those behind bills like this get to immerse themselves in a world of sexuality while simultaneously claiming to be on the side of the antisexual angels. We know now quite a bit about the sexual underworld created during the Victorian era. We need studies of the psychosexual underworld being created today in South Carolina and other states trying to bring back that bye-gone time. Similarly, I wonder what is going on in Iraq as a repressive sexual morality is ruthlessly imposed upon the populace
April 23rd, 2006
Nowhere Man, a diarist on Daily Kos, has a wonderful little piece on Why my grandma hates profanity (and why you should care). His grandmother, a progressive throughout her life, and certainly no prude [she reportedly told her mother “Oh, mother, you don't need a penis to fix a lamp cord.”], hated the abasement of language and the stereotyped communication involved in profanity.
She said that language can be used for a lot of different things: To describe a feeling, to send a message, to persuade. Profanity didn’t serve well for any of those. Any time I used a swear word, she told me, I was putting highly-skilled, hard-working words out of work, and letting some lazy, illiterate slob take its place. And it meant that I wasn’t saying anything that she couldn’t hear a hundred times a day. So what would be the point? She’d rather I used words that she’d want to pay attention to.
OK, I said, I can see why she didn’t like hearing that sort of thing. But they’re just words, after all. Just particular sounds. Why would this one or the other really be a problem? Why, for instance, is the common term for sexual intercourse such a taboo to her?
Then came another priceless reply: Can you imagine telling your worst enemy to go have a good meal? Well then, why would you want them to enjoy a different but wonderful experience?
Read the wole piece!
April 19th, 2006
In the latest bad news for the environment, the Independent reports that the United States increased greenhouse emissions 1,7% in 2004. [Scientists condemn US as emissions of greenhouse gases hit record level] This, of course, is the exact opposite of what is needed if the environment is not to radically deteriorate, with serious, if not catastrophic, consequences for human civilization.
“Scientists have suggested that if the international community is to try to stabilise carbon dioxide levels at twice pre-industrial levels then countries such as the US and Britain need to reduce emissions by about 60 per cent by the middle of this century.”
April 18th, 2006
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