Delightful News From the Middle Coast

At 1451ft, Chicago's Willis Tower (née Sears) is the tallest building in the Western World

Our associates in Chicago informed us recently that some of the news out there in this cold, dark world these days is good and we felt we should share:

The Sears Tower, lately unceremoniously renamed the Willis tower, is about to pioneer a kind of crazy-innovative window, one that produces power without obstructing the view or letting in appreciably less sunlight.

At first the Willis tower will only replace windows on the south side of the 56th floor; eventually, the whole south face of the building could be slathered in glorious high tech energy generating windows, enough to generate 2 MW of power. The windows have the added benefit of keeping out the excess heat energy that plagues glass buildings.

As incredible as these windows sound, they're only a small part of a larger, $350 million initiative to reduce electricity consumption of the entire Willis tower by 80 percent.

(courtesy grist.org)

So please, Internet, I implore you to take a moment to block out the horrific situations in Japan, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, Wall Street, Detroit, Wisconsin, America, Mexico...etcetera, draw in a few good deep breaths, loosen the muscles in your neck, and soak-up a little ray of sunshine before you head back into the courtroom of public opinion and perjure yourself by saying the whole world has gone to shit because it hasn't.

Only most of it has.

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The Green Dragon is a Superhero, Not a Villain

The Republican strategy over the last 40 years can be boiled down to one phrase: they are the party of discontent. It's easier to get mad about the state of the world than it is to fix it; it's easier to breed discontent than loyalty to a cause.

It's also easy to create chaos as a smokescreen to legislate morality and advance a selfish corporate agenda that favors the rich.

As the party seems to run increasingly in lockstep with the Religious Right of late, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate the two groups. Although not all Republicans belong to the Religious Right (the smartest ones only sell their souls for tax cuts and corporate socialism), all Religious Right folks are Republicans, and so their fates are in concert.

As such, while I don't find this latest news surprising, I do find it eminently troubling:

Various conservative Christian leaders have united with the Cornwall Alliance for the release of a shocking new 12-part DVD series, "Resisting The Green Dragon," that attempts to debase and discredit the environmental movement by portraying it as "one of the greatest deceptions of our day" that is "seducing your children" and "striving to put America and the world under its destructive control."

In the video, David Barton, founder of WallBuilders, attests that environmentalists' "false assertions are based more on their own morbid pessimistic fears, not on any good science," while the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Dr. Richard Land, says, "Environmentalists have a long history of believing and promoting exaggerations and myths" -- statements both so steeped in irony that they are hardly worth parrying.

"One of the greatest threats to society and the church today is the multifaceted environmentalist movement," says Cornwall Alliance founder and national spokesman Dr. E. Calvin Beisner. "There isn't an aspect of life that it doesn't seek to force into its own mold."

(courtesy HuffPo)

Boy, that WallBuilder fellow sure is good at his job...of building walls wherever they can be built, regardless of need. At least, I assume that's what his job is, since no other description seems to fit the bill.

And so it goes that religious groups continue their relentless march to breed discontent between people who would otherwise find substantial common ground.

All religious doctrine, abridged:

Be nice to people, unless they belong to another group of people who also want to be nice to people. In this case, they are your enemy.

And so the ongoing Republican attack on all the "anti-religious" social advancements of the last 100+ years and vital "job-killing" environmental regulations has a delightfully bold ally in their quest to end mankind's tenure on Earth way ahead of schedule.

Okay, So...These Guys Are Fucked

Something tells me oil doesn't wash out of your stomach very easily, so something (Jeebus?) also tells me these two firemen are sacrificing their lives to try to stop an oil spill caused by the explosion of a pipeline in China.

I'm sure the massive trillion-dollar company in charge of the pipeline greatly appreciates their efforts and will reward their bereaved families with $100 of free gas at the very least and $150 at the very most. The environment thanks them for their heroic efforts, but that has never been a very tangible reward and has certainly never put food in anybody's bellies or cured their cancer.

The pipeline blaze:

Whoa.

Also whoa:

"We don't have proper oil cleanup materials, so our workers are wearing rubber gloves and using chopsticks," an official with the Jinshitan Golden Beach Administration Committee told the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper in apparent exasperation. "This kind of inefficiency means the oil will keep coming to shore. ... This stretch of oil is really difficult to clean up in the short term."

(courtesy HuffPo)

Oh, it's difficult to clean up an oil spill with chopsticks? No shit, asshole. Maybe you and everybody else in town should have thought about that before you let Asia's largest oil company run a pipeline into your bay.

Has there ever been a pipeline that did not leak at some point?

Also, aren't all of the world's plastic shovels and buckets and pasta strainers made in China? Do they really need to resort to chopsticks, or is there some sort of perverted national pride going on here?




[Photos courtesy AP]

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"I am shocked--SHOCKED--to find there is corruption going on in here."

Ladies and gentlemen...there is corruption in the oil industry.

I know, I know--WHAT?!

But it's true. Apparently, all this time--when I thought they were being responsible businessmen and honorable custodians of the environment--they have been bribing government officials to let them do whatever they want, drowning Congress in money to prevent both regulation as well as alternative energy development, manipulating prices to engineer windfall profits, and cutting corners at the expense of the environment.

The question here is: What are we going to do about it?

The answer here is: Nothing, sadly.

The better question here is: What CAN we do about it?

The answer here is: Nothing, sadly.

And so the distressed ostrich tucks his little head into the bosom of Mother Earth and ignores the hopeless sadness of the world around him. Death will come soon, but not soon enough.

Until then, enjoy yourself, for Christ's sake, ostrich!

Take those jet skis out to Lake Havasu and tear some shit up! Throw your aluminum beer bottles to the wind! Shoot some guns in the park! Forget to feed your baby! Who cares! We'll all be dead in 50 years anyway! WHOOOOOOO!!!


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Sexy Apartment

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Et tu, Brute?

How do you know when a straw is your last?

Just when I thought all the straws were long gone, this uber-depressing news comes via Huffington Post:

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.
Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC's claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry.

Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury -- a potent neurotoxin -- at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits.
The discovery of Thorsen's fraud came as the result of an investigation by Aarhus University and CDC which discovered that Thorsen had falsified documents and, in violation of university rules, was accepting salaries from both the Danish university and Emory University in Atlanta -- near CDC headquarters -- where he led research efforts to defend the role of vaccines in causing autism and other brain disorders. Thorsen's center has received $14.6 million from CDC since 2002.

Leading independent scientists have accused CDC of concealing the clear link between the dramatic increases in mercury-laced child vaccinations beginning in 1989 and the epidemic of autism, neurological disorders and other illnesses affecting every generation of American children since. Questions about Thorsens's scientific integrity may finally force CDC to rethink the vaccine protocols since most of the other key pro vaccine studies cited by CDC rely on the findings of Thorsen's research group.

You know, when you can't even count on doctors and scientists funded by the CDC to be honest about their research into the effects of drugs on children, I think you need to doubt just about everybody out there, no matter what they do.

So, the next time your doctor says you'll feel much better with a new horse-pill down your gullet once a day, the next time your banker says you should take advantage of a great new opportunity, the next time your mechanic says you need a new thingermajigger, tackle him to the ground, stick the tip of a knife into his throat, and ask him again, when his life depends on it.

It sucks that things have come to this, but these days, you need to be sure.


By the way, since I haven't had a chance to mention it before, I had the great fortune of hearing Robert Kennedy, Jr. give a speech once, and it was not only eye-opening, but downright inspiring. I thought to myself that, if it weren't for the speech impediment and the Conservative bent of the deluded common folk, he would be president right now, could be president right now.

He was speaking at the 2008 Border Governors Conference in Universal City, CA, and damn if he didn't--off the top of his head--spend fifteen passionate minutes telling the whole auditorium, in great-yet-completely-accessible detail, how to greenly solve the energy crisis--at a profit--in a mere ten-year span.

It involves updating the nation's admittedly archaic energy grid--at great initial expense, but easily recouped over time--to allow for energy to be soaked up (via solar panels, wind turbines, etc) where fewer people use energy (deserts, the Great Plains, etc) and sent back into the grid to supply those areas where more energy is used but less is generated, which is something that is impossible right now.

It is a simple solution to our problems that the oil companies--and those invested-in/owned-by them--don't like. Meanwhile, Israel--among other small nations--are in the process of converting their energy grid to do this (RFKJ's company is helping them do it) because it makes sense, damnit.

Did the U.S. and Mexican Governors at the conference listen?

Well, let's put it this way--despite the fact that it was a conference focused mainly on better stewardship of the environment (per The Governator), most of the governors weren't even pretending to listen and the Governor of Texas walked out after two minutes.

Maybe RFKJ should have chased him down, tackled him, put a knife to his throat, and...

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