Centerblue.org

First New York moved to ban smoking in public places. Then it banned trans fat from restaurant menus. Now it may ban people from using Ipods and cell phones while crossing the street.

Can’t people take care of themselves? I understand the government has some duty to protect its citizenry, and I approve of measures limiting cell phone behavior and the like while driving because of dangers posed to innocent bystanders, but this brand of paternalism we’re seeing out of New York is getting ridiculous. People need to take some accountability for the consequences of their own actions.

What’s next–banning bicycle riding?

The blog software upgrade is about half complete. It is currently in its plain form without a theme using the new theme but with a lot of functionality missing. I’ll be working on that over the next day or two, during which time there may be intermittent errors on the page. I apologize for the inconvenience.

What are YOU doing about global warming?

Sometime in the next few days I will be taking this blog down for maintenance — upgrading it to the latest and more secure version of Wordpress. These upgrades tend to not be problem free, so there may be some downtime. If so I apologize in advance and ask for your patience.

Bush administration officials are saying that the president will be requesting another $245 billion (yes, a hair short of a quarter of a trillion dollars) to fund continuing war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2007 and 2008. That’s quite apart from the $360 billion or so we have already spent, for a grand total of…kaching!….$600 billion and change, well over half a trillion dollars.

That’s a financial train wreck at its best….we could have done so much fix our own society’s problems with that kind of money. What a bastard.

“You did it! You finally did it! Damn you all to hell!” –Charlton Heston, “Planet of the Apes”

The first major global warming report for this year has come out of Paris, and it’s not pretty. Pretty damn depressing is more like it.

The report, put together by hundreds of scientists, bureaucrats, and skeptics worldwide based on thousands of studies, contains these gems:

• Using the strongest language ever, the report stated that it is “very likely” (that is, a 90%+ likelihood of certainty), that the warming effects we are seeing world-wide (including droughts, heat waves, and mega-strong tropical storms) are directly attributable to man-made causes rather than natural variations in climate.
• Global warming has in fact become unstoppable. We’ve really done it with the planet’s climate. Our only choices now are among mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. The more carbon we mitigate going forward, the less we’ll suffer down the road. But regardless of what we do and barring some blockbuster technology that can suck the carbon out of the air quickly we will be stuck with some measure of rising sea levels, melting ice caps, and desertification for the next thousand years–and we will have no choice but to adapt.

It is unfathomable to me that a single generation of humans has essentially wrecked the planet for our descendants for thousands of years to come–if they manage to survive the changes at all. It is more obvious than ever that we have a moral duty to ourselves and our children to do everything possible RIGHT NOW to minimize the damage we’ve done–and hope for a cure in the next couple of decades from advances in nanotechnology and the like.

Over the course of the next few weeks I’ll be posting some articles on what we as individuals can do right now to help stop global warming. It’s a global problem, but each of us can do things to help deal with it if we have the will to do so.