According to the Baltimore County government website, we're going to get an upgraded "single stream" recycling program starting next year. Not only will booth bottles and cans and paper be collected together every week, but an expanded array of materials will be recycled, including plastic bottles of types 1 to 7, wide-mouth plastic containers (like yogurt containers), rigid plastics, spray cans, aluminum foil, and milk and juice cartons.
I say again: ugh.
Shaolin is not just the setting for kung-fu dramas. It is -- or rather, was, prior to the murderous reign of Mao -- a real temple, regarded as the birthplace of Ch'an/Zen Buddhism. Legend has it that 1,500 years ago, Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen, came from India (or maybe Persia) and ended up at Shaolin, where he spent several years in seated meditation, staring at the wall of a cave. He supposedly found the monks at Shaolin too weak to endure the rigors of his style of meditation, so introduced a set of exercises (presumably with some origin from yoga) that became the basis of kung fu/wushu and, later, karate, and also of qi gong and Asian bodywork therapies. (It's a good myth, but any connection to actual historical events is probably coincidental.)
Modern "Shaolin kung fu" is an impressive array of acrobatics that has fsck-all to do with Zen, wushu, or everyone's favorite red-bearded barbarian.
Pity the poor temple, ravaged decades ago by Maoism, and now by capitalism.
I say once more time: ugh.
From the blog of American student Lily Sussman:
I was sitting on the deck overlooking the Red Sea. Israeli security officers (most who looked around 18 years old) had completed around two hours of questioning and searching me. They had pressed every sock and scarf with a security device, ripped open soap and had me strip extra layers. They asked me tons of questions–where are you going? Who do you know? Do you have a boyfriend? Is he Arab, Egyptian, Palestinian? Why do you live in Egypt? Why not Israel? What do you know about the ‘conflict’ here? What do you think? They quized me on Judaism,which I know nothing about.
...
Moments later a man came outside and introduced himself as the manager on duty. And then, “I’m sorry but we had to blow up your laptop. “
A clear, if thankfully mild, incident of state terrorism: "We see that you have political views we find unacceptable. We will therefore, under cover of 'security procedure', seek to intimidate you with violence toward your property."
Zelda's Inferno exercise: make up news headlines. Some folks went with the funny on this one, but I found myself frustrated at seeing the same bad news and stupid opinions over and over again, so this came out
Generic headlines for today's top stories:
* World News:
- Foreigners are funny and not as good as us
- Foreigners are taking our jobs
- Our army killed a bunch of foreigners
- Foreigners we like are fighting foreigners we don't like
* National:
- Celebrity may have had an affair
- We have always been at war with Oceania
Ever wonder just what the rules were for the security theater that the TSA treats us to every time we fly? Now you can find out! Their super-secret "Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure" is published on the internet. They planned to block out the super-secret parts. But...
So the decision to publish it on the Internet is probably a questionable one. On top of that, however, is where the real idiocy shines. They chose to publish a redacted version of the document, hiding all the super-important stuff from the public. But they apparently don’t understand how redaction works in the electronic document world. See, rather than actually removing the offending text from the document they just drew a black box on top of it. Turns out that PDF documents don’t really care about the black box like that and the actual content of the document is still in the file.
Get yourself a copy of the cleared up document here (ZIPped PDF file).
Zelda's Inferno exercise: Chandlerean similes about people. I recently re-read Raymond Chandler's The High Window and was blown away by the line "She had eyes like strange sins." So I had the Zelda's crew try their hand at vivid similes. Here's my attempt.
She was as well-balanced as a slinky: one little push and she'd tip over and over and over until her energy ran down.
He was quiet, in the way that a car with a finely tuned engine and a tailpipe scraping on the ground is quiet.
She stuck to him like pine sap -- only alcohol could remove her.
His sense of virtue was like aluminum foil, shiny but thin and cheap and easy to tear and crumple.
His brain was like an old TV with a broken vertical hold, you could make out the picture but it kept jumping, scrolling up.
She entered the room like a bag of running chainsaws thrown through the door.
She had remade herself after the move, but the old woman still showed through, like the old color poking out under a sloppy paint job.
I thought someone had opened the door to let the heat out, but it was just her walking in.
His eyes were as flat as a beer left to sit out all night.
Her voice cut like a piano-wire garrote.
She looked as tough as stone, but under pressure crumpled like paper painted with a faux-stone finish.
I just learned today that the Association for Consciousness Exploration's Starwood festival -- one of the largest Neo-Pagan gatherings in the country and an event which I have attended for a decade -- has lost its longtime home at the Brushwood Folklore Center.
(See previous posts about Starwood here and here and here and here.)
ACE plans to relocate Starwood, and Brushwood plans its own summer festival for the time that was occupied by Starwood.
It is a tremendously sad day for the Pagan community. Something that was very special to many of us has been lost. Perhaps something new, and even better, will come along out the relocation of Starwood and the new summer festival; but that's a hope for the future, while the fact of the present is mourning a great loss.
ACE is the yang that energized the yin of Brushwood to make the magic of Starwood. When yang and yin separate, the result is death. Which is, of course, in the long run just a transformation; but it is still a cause for grief.
Several years ago, I stumbled across this lovely little Zen poem. The book in which I read it did not name the author, but now, thanks to Google, I can attribute it to Cathy Preston:
"A Gatha for Your Journey"
Whenever the work of saving all sentient beings
Becomes too much for this present moment, I vow with all beings
To breathe in the grace of the morning star
And remember that they are really saving me.
Back in August, I said "Seems we can look forward to the same sort of lies, manipulation, and manufactured outrage about climate change we're currently enjoying about health care." I hate to say "I told you so", but as we see the same sort of wacko conspiracy theories and the same sort out-of-context quoting as was applied to the health care debate being applied to the stolen emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University...well, I told you so.
So what's really going on here?
First, some background on the science. We know, as certainly as we know anything, that the greenhouse effect is real, that carbon dioxide, methane, ozone (essentially, ozone up high good, ozone down low bad), and CFCs are greenhouse gasses whose presence in the atmosphere makes the planet warmer.
We know for certain that human activity -- the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, certain agricultural techniques -- is adding to levels of these gasses. CO2 levels have risen from about 280 to nearly 380 ppm over the past century and a half, and this CO2 does not come from the oceans outgassing CO2. It's from burning fossil fuels and from deforestation.
These points are simply not open for debate among rational people. If you wish to dispute them, please go wait in line behind the creationists, the "death panel"ers, the "birthers", the "a missile hit the Pentagon and the WTC was brought down with a controlled demolition!" variety of "9/11 truthers", and the Holocaust deniers. Thanks.
We also know with a high degree of certainty that the planet is warming up. This conclusion takes us into the realm of history, which is never as certain as physics or chemistry -- we can't re-run history like we can a physics experiment. And our knowledge of history is very biased: we have the best data from regions where there were literate civilizations, and have to rely on paleontological methods for the rest of the world. Still, while the details are fuzzy, our certainty that the planet warming is very high. That doesn't mean that measured surface temperatures for every year will be warmer than the previous one, any more than every day in May is going to be warmer than the one before.
You can see some some pictures and some details of the temperature trends here and here.
Knowing that the planet is warming, and knowing that we're doing stuff that tends to make the planet warm up, most people would jump to the conclusion that the first is caused by the second.
But scientists are professional skeptics, and thus have to account for extraordinary possibilities. It could be merely a coincidence: the planet does have natural warming and cooling cycles and natural fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 levels. Real skeptics recognize that this would be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence -- something on the order of claiming that "yes, Smith pointed a gun at Jones and pulled the trigger, and Jones got a hole in him and died, but the wound actually came from a meteorite that coincidentally hit that precise place at that exact time". Possible, but not something that's going to be accepted over the more usual explanation -- Smith shot Jones -- without some significant evidence.
Real skeptics remain open to the presentation of such evidence, but so far, none has come to light. Proposals that the warming can be accounted for by changes in cosmic rays or by changes in solar luminosity (i.e., the the sun getting brighter; see also Peter Laut's paper here) -- changes that would have to just happen to correspond with the uptick in industrial activity -- haven't panned out.
On the other hand, corporate shills, or those who hold to religious beliefs that their god gave mankind the planet to tear up like a spoiled kid messing up a fancy car, or that "property rights" or "markets" are more important than people, have strong incentive to deny the science. Instead they hold that the IPCC, NASA, NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences, the science academies of Brazil, China and India, and numerous other scientific organizations, are all engaged in a sinister conspiracy, with the apparent goal of undermining the national sovereignty of the U.S. and restricting it's God-given right to spew whatever it wants into the atmosphere, in order to...well, that part of the batshit crazy conspiracy theory has never been clear to me. I guess climatologists just hate freedom.
Given the politicization of science, and the prevalence of this sort of batshit crazy conspiracy theory, we can perhaps understand why some climatologists would express frustration -- even express it rudely -- in e-mail intended to be private, shop-talk between colleagues.
So, with that background, let's look at a few of the bits of stolen e-mail causing the most buzz. Time and space only permits me to refute a small part of the batshittery here, but if you want to dig deeper, the discussion threads at realclimate.org are a good place to start.
Let's say you're a wacko hiding out in the mountains of Afghanistan, and you really hate Americans. You'd really like to kill a bunch of them, even if you'd have to put your own life at risk.
Problem is, Americans are halfway across the world. What you'd really like is someone to deliver some Americans to your doorstep.
I'm sure, then, that you'd be overjoyed to learn that Obama is going to send you 34,000 more targets.
This wacko who wants American troops to come to him to be killed is not hypothetical. According to Abdel Bari Atwan, editor in chief of Arabic newspaper Al-Quds Al Arab, in a 1996 interview Osama Bin Laden said, “I can’t fight the Americans on the American mainland. It is too far. But if I succeed in bringing the Americans where I can find them, where I can fight them on my own terms, on my turf, on my own ground, this will be the greatest success."
So I'm sure Bin Laden is thrilled that Bush and Obama have played right into his hands and given him what he most wants: convenient American targets. Why bother to set up intricate and expensive terrorist operations to kill them on their home turf, when they send their naive youth and nationalistic true believers to your doorstep for your murderous pleasure?