2006-06-04 - 12:18 p.m.
Excuse me for a minute while I remove �Counter Spy��there, thank you. Counter Spy was just the latest of the many add-on computer �protections� that came highly recommended that have done nothing but corrupt, slow down, and make all but inoperable my computer. When will I ever learn? And that was one that I even PAID for, not a free download with hopes that I would like it and send some money.
One of our computer techs provided me with a marvelous solution to my computer problems, which I would do if only I were willing to spend close to $3,000. My dilemma was that I had learned how great Macs were (my laptop is a Mac and for the past year or so my computer at work has been a Mac, except that my Mac at work connects to the school�s server, so I can �become� a PC any time I need to, and often I need to, as many of the Internet-based sites I need to access, such as our school�s dental plan, for example, won�t work on Safari, the Mac browser, and Internet Explorer for the Mac isn�t being updated anymore). And I do really very much like Microsoft Word and Excel, although in other software, such as Apple�s Keynote versus Microsoft�s Power Point, not to mention ALL the I-Life applications that Apple has, the Mac software is better than anything Microsoft ever dreamed of. (I�d probably come to love Apple�s word processing and spreadsheet applications, too, except that I have designed so much on Microsoft Word and Excel that to change over seems almost like getting rid of the QWERTY keyboard). But upon buying a new desktop computer for home, I balk at getting another trouble-prone PC, even though I need capability in both systems�otherwise I would just chuck the desktop and make my Mac laptop my one and only computer.
Well, as the computer tech informed me, the new I-Macs have the �Intel Core Duo� Processor that works perfectly well on both Apple and Microsoft software and therefore that one desktop could be both systems in one. If I were to get it, I would like to have the top levels of all the options (as not doing so just makes your computer obsolete all that much faster), and thus the price increases rapidly from that otherwise very reasonable base.
But I swear, if I get any more frustrated (my home computer crashes several times each and every work session), I�ll just go ahead and click on �SEND� what I have lined up in my Apple shopping cart. Some day, when I least expect it, I may just end up $3,000 poorer (more likely, that much in debt).
So much for my computer rant.
The concert I went to last night (that which interrupted yesterday�s entry), the Angel City Chorale�s �Sweeping Through The City�, was great. I went to it because a co-worker is in the Chorale, sings some solos, and also arranged some of their works they performed. The performance also ended up being a fund-raiser for Katrina relief, namely benefiting the New Orleans Children�s Chorus, which was broken up by many of their members being spread far and wide across the U.S.
The music they performed was wonderful, a great mix of Negro spirituals, Gospel, New Orleans jazz, and Zydeco. Frankly, I didn�t expect to like the Zydeco, but it was a Zydeco medly that my co-worker had arranged and it was great! Just to read through the song titles shows how cleverly this concert was put together: �House of the Rising Sun,� �There�s A Leak in this Old Building,� �Down Here Lord,� �Didn�t It Rain,� �Hold On,� �Louisiana 1927� (about a similar disaster that happened in 1927), �This Too Will Pass,� �Bridge Over Troubled Water,� �Yes We Can,� �Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?� and several others. The concert ended with, of course, they almost HAD to, an audience sing-along of �When The Saints Come Marching In�, as we all marched from our pews into the fellowship hall where there was going to be the reception.
Thank goodness they didn�t use the opportunity to present a political plug against �global warming�. Katrina has been used by some politicians to �prove� global warming, but maybe the chorale�s memories of climatological disasters go back further than just a few months. I have one friend at work who had lived in Miami during Hurricane Andrew. I know some others who suffered through horrendous destruction in Cancun during one of the many hurricanes that have occurred down there over the years. A Hawaii-based friend remembers what happened on Kauai. I, myself, saw the effects of hurricane destruction of the reef near Cozumel, and in 1970 I saw an almost entirely empty Mississippi Gulf Coast, just miles of flat concrete foundations with broken pipes sticking up that used to be shopping malls, the aftermath of Hurricane Camille.
As a child growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, I asked my father one time, after a visit to the North Carolina coast, why we didn�t live at the beach (I guess that was a child�s question similar to why we didn�t live at Disneyland), and he answered that the hurricanes routinely destroyed everything there, that it was no place to live.
Yes, Katrina was a horrible disaster, but really, a �typical� major hurricane, made much worse by the city having been built below sea level coupled with damage to the protecting levies that separated the city from an immense lake. Let�s be real--don�t blame global warming for that!
In my last entry, I wrote about movies, particularly propagandizing documentaries, not having that much influence on people. Following upon that principle, I would say that movie reviewers are one step even further removed from having much influence on people. But, despite that, since I enjoy movies, I also read movie reviewers and despite his occasional weirdness, Roger Ebert is one of my favorites. But boy, did he ever go over the deep end and lose it on this one.
Ebert scores movies with a series of stars, four being the maximum score. Extremely rarely have I ever seen him give four stars, with three and a half stars being pretty darned good. However, with this Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Truth, bam!, he gave it four stars (whereas more reasonable viewers gave it three stars) and in the process not once actually reviewed the quality of the movie. Instead, he positioned it as being the second coming of Christ or some such (not really, but that was how he acted about it), making the serious critical mistake of highly rating the movie simply because he believed in the subject matter.
I�d like to contrast Ebert�s review with a critique of Al Gore�s book, Earth In The Balance, written not by a journalist like Ebert whose subject is movies, but by P.J. O�Rourke, a journalist whose subject is world events. Whereas Ebert sees the world on a screen from within a darkened movie theater, O�Rourke sees the world for hyper-real, visiting war zones, observing disasters, attending global conferences, and interviewing world leaders and rebels. This comes from O�Rourke�s book, All The Trouble In The World (The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty), described in the L.A Times as �One of the funniest, most insightful, dead-on-the-money books of the year.�
While O�Roarke�s writing is �laugh out loud� funny, dispensing sometimes harsh truths in a palatable way, concerning Al Gore (O�Roarke�s book came out during Gore�s vice-presidency), O�Roarke is not amused.
Ebert wrote, �I am a liberal, but I do not intend this as a review reflecting any kind of politics�.Forget [Al Gore] ever ran for office. Consider him a concerned man speaking out on the approaching crisis.�
O�Roarke refers back to Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalog fame, who said, �We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion�guilt-free at last!�
O�Roarke�s response to that is: �The specter of biosphere doom serves the mystical needs of people too sloppy and self-indulgent for regular religion. And it is a scary story to tell in the (energy-conserving) dark. But the ultimate appeal of ecological catastrophe has to do with politics rather than Yahweh or Rod Serling.
�Ecological utopias could be achieved only by massive political coercion. Said David Foreman in A Field Guide to Monkey Wrenching, �We must�reclaim the roads and the plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness millions and tens of millions of [acres of] presently settled land.��
O�Roarke says "Who's 'we'?" and then goes on to say that Al Gore�s solutions to environmental problems as outlined in Gore�s book, Earth In The Balance, would require a huge increase in political power over individuals. Gore wrote, �Human civilization is now so complex and diverse, so sprawling and massive, that it is difficult to see how we can respond in a coordinated collective way to the global environmental crisis. But circumstances are forcing just such a response.�
People are afraid of Bush and the Neocon Republicans attemping to create a totalitarian one-world government, and yet what the liberal, environmental Democrats are proposing is the exact same thing. O�Roarke wrote, �The whole dreadful history of twentieth-century politics has been made up of �coordinated, collective� responses [to throw Gore�s words right back at him] to supposed threats that were always said to be �complex and diverse� and �sprawling and massive�. Nazis, Fascists, Bolsheviks, Maoists, Islamic Fundamentalists�responded �in a coordinated, collective way� to the Jews, the bourgeoisie, private property, class enemies, decadent Western culture�. The results were universally horrendous�.�
So there is absolutely no way to take Al Gore as anybody but somebody running for President, seeking a political response.
Ebert says, �Global warming is real. It is caused by human activity. Mankind and governments [�governments�?�yet this isn�t political?] must begin immediate action to halt and reverse it. If we do nothing, in about 10 years the planet may reach a �tipping point� and begin a slide toward destruction of our civilization and most of the other species on this planet [�chicken little�, much?]. After that point is reached, it would be too late for any action.�
After that point is reached, I�d say �fill up my drink glass with your finest Scotch, strike up the band, and let�s dance the night away while the Titanic sinks.�
Ebert says that according to Gore, �There is no controversy about these facts�.about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero.� I�d say �zero� is a mighty big number. Not ONE scientist disagrees with this? Scientists can�t even agree over which foods are fattening, or whether it is even desirable (or safe) to drink six glasses of water a day (is this needed for hydration, or does it wash away your vitamins? And oh, speaking of vitamins�.).
O�Roarke would agree with Ebert on his statement of Gore�s absolute certainty that this is the �truth�: �Al Gore will brook no argument about the greenhouse effect. In Earth In The Balance he says: �The theory of global warming will not be disproved.�� However, a Gallup poll taken about the time this book came out revealed that of four hundred meteorologists and geophysicists, 60 percent thought that global temperatures had risen in the last century, but only 19 percent attributed this to man-make causes.
O�Roarke continues, �Greenpeace itself surveyed 400 Greenpeace-picked scientists, and just 13 percent deemed runaway global warming probable. This does not deter Al. Says he, �Scientists concluded�almost unanimously�that global warming is real and the time to act is now.��
Speaking of �the time to act is now�, O�Roarke points out that a few decades ago, the issue was global cooling and the time to act was then. Do the following global cooling quotes sound like the exact same statements coming from global warming fanatics?
�Meterologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend�.But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.��Peter Gwynne, Newsweek, April 28, 1975
�[T]he threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.��Nigel Calder, International Wildlife, July 1975
�The cooling has already killed hundreds of thousand of people in poor nations�.If it continues, and no strong measures are taken to deal with it, the cooling will cause world famine, world chaos, and probably world war, and this could all come by the year 2000.��Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, 1976
O�Roarke wrote, �The global freeze that killed us then and the global boil that will kill us soon are both caused, of course, by technological progress�:
�The continued rapid cooling of the earth since World War II is also in accord with the increased pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization, and an exploding population.��Reid Bryson, Global Ecology: Readings Towards a Rational Strategy for Man, 1971
�An increase by only a factor of four in global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 degrees Kelvin�sufficient to trigger an ice age.��Dr S.I. Rasool and Dr. S.H. Schneider, Science, July 9, 1971.
O�Roarke gleefully points out, ��we were supposed to do the same things to stop the earthly shivers that we�re now supposed to do to halt the planetary sweats.� O�Roarke also has a lot of fun dissing other supposedly well-known and fully-accepted environmental �facts�:
Ozone Damage: �While there is evidence that the ozone damage is happening, it has proven impossible so far to detect any resulting increase in [ultraviolet light] reaching the ground�.
�The amount of increase that theory says we could be getting from ozone depletion is smaller than the error of our best measuring instruments.... People get all excited about a few-percent change in UV, but it�s nothing to get a 20 percent increase naturally. IF an increase of 20 percent were going to be so damaging, there should be no life in Florida�.��John E. Frederick, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Chigago.
Oil Spills: �The Amoco Cadiz,�ran aground off the coast of France in 1978. The ensuing spill was six times as large as the Exxon Valdez�s; 1,635,000 barrels of oil wound up on the beaches, birds, oyster beds, fisheries, and Bretons of Brittany. Several thousand avians died, but no long-term effects on bird population has been discovered. Fish died, too, but, again, the effect was temporary�if not for specific fish, for fish in general. Two years after the spill scientists found �little evidence of histopathological and biochemical damage� to the oysters�. Soap cleaned the Bretons, wave action cleaned the beaches, and the saltwater marshes repaired themselves. They did so better, in fact, than man was able to do. The [bi-partisan Congressional Research Service] noted that marshes where no attempt was made to remove the oil were �restored by natural processes within 5 years, whereas in cleaned areas, restoration took 7 to 8 years.� A slew of lawsuits later, total damage to France and its minions and wards was determined to be $115.2 million.
�Exxon had to spend $2.2 billion cleaning up after the Valdez. It paid an additional $800 million to Alaska and the federal government, and, as of this writing [1990s] still faces $1.5 billion in civil lawsuits. That�s $4.5 billion Exxon could have spent reducing the price of home heating oil for the poor�.�
Dying Out Species: �The Earth is nearing a stage of extinction of species unequaled since that of the age of the dinosaurs.��Government Accounting Office report, to which O�Roarke replies, �Are we talking rhinos and tigers, or are we talking shower-curtain mold and windshield bugs?� He then goes on to say, �One reason we are losing so many species is that we�ve decided there are so many more species to lose�.. Taxonomists used to think the earth had three or four million distinct kinds of living things. Then, in the 1960s, tropical rain forests were brought to taxonomy�s attention. These wet, steaming locales proved to contain a terrific (you can take my word for it) profusion of life forms�.
�Terry Erwin of the U.S. National Zoo calculated that there are 30 million species of insects; recently, mycologist David Hawksworth reckoned that there are 1.5 million types of fungi. And no scientist has even a guess at how many microorganisms remain to be added to the tally�.
�Some biologists now think the total number of species may be nearly 100 million. However, to date, only about 1.4 million of these have been captured, looked at, and named. �As a result,� says Charles Mann [of Science Magazine], �those who prophesy the end of half the world�s species find themselves in the awkward position of predicting the imminent demise of huge numbers of species nobody has ever seen.�� To which O�Roarke adds, �Several of which might cure cancer, of course. And several of which might cause it.�
Recycling: Fast-food packaging makes up just one-tenth of one percent (that is 0.1%) of municipal waste. And the packaging that we use cuts down on food waste. Dr. Rathje of the University of Arizona�s Garbage Project excavated landfills in the United States and Mexico, and discovered that Americans discarded twice as much food packaging as Mexicans, but Mexicans discarded three times as much food.
A National Wildlife Federation study showed that recycling one hundred tons of newspaper produces forty tons of toxic sludge. "'Thirteen of the 50 worst Superfund hazardous waste dumps were once recycling facilities,� says Taylor.�
The work of chemist Martin Hocking determined that making a paper cup requires 36 times as much electricity as making a Styrofoam cup and generates 580 times as much waste water.
And regarding biodegradable products, George Prios, executive director of the New York State Legislative Commission on the Water Needs of Long Island, said, �If biodegradable products end up in landfills, they will break down and form leachate and methane gas, the two major problems with all current landfills. Non-biodegradable materials, such as plastics, are therefore more desirable in landfills than biodegradable materials.�
Air Pollution: O�Roarke wrote, �I can find people to say good things about dirty air. �Measurements from Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland show a general increase of forest resources. The fertilization effects of pollutants override the adverse effects�.�, claim Pekka E. Kauppi, Kario Mielikainen, and Kullervo Kuusela, who must have some pretty advanced college degrees just to spell their names.�
DDT: Dixy Lee Ray, a zoology professor, past chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and former governor of Washington State, calls the charges against what O�Roarke called �this famously pestilent pesticide� �unsubstantiated�. And Ray says that by not using this stuff, we�re causing a huge increase in worldwide mosquito-borne disease. Sri Lanka had 2.8 million cases of malaria in 1948. Then DDT spraying started. By 1963, there were only 17 malaria cases. Then DDT spraying stopped. In 1968, Sri Lanka was back up to a million cases of malaria.
What about pesticide residue in milk, which was considered such a danger in the book, 50 Simple Things You Can Do To Save The Earth, where they stated, �All milk sold in the U.S. today contains pesticide residue�? Catherine Carnevale, who at the time was the director of the Office of Constituent Operations at the FDA, reported that in the mid-90s, the highest level of milk contaminations found by the FDA was .04 parts per million. O�Roarke wrote, ��that�s 3/100,000,000ths more than what�s technically known as �none�.� Dr. Carnevale said that she felt that this pesticide level had �no toxicological significance�.
Does anyone remember the Alar cancer-from-apples scare? According to the book, Apocalypse Not, written by economist Ben Bolch and chemist Harold Lyons, in order to do the same cancer experiment on humans that had been done on lab animals, it would require each human subject to eat fifty thousand apples a day for life. And Sanford Miller, dean of the Graduate School of Biochemical Sciences at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said, �The risk of pesticide residues to consumers is effectively zero. This is what some fourteen scientific studies representing over 100,000 microbiologists, toxicologists and food scientists said at the time of the ridiculous Alar scare. But we were ignored.�
This kind of thing can go on and on and on, and my advice is to ignore rabid politicians running around screaming, �We�re all going to die unless you put us in charge of everything!�
Which just makes Roger Ebert all the more ridiculous. He said, �You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to.�
Huh? We are supposed to apologize to our grandchildren that we did not go see a certain film? [Grandpa Schmidt, why didn�t you go see Triumph of the Will?]
Ebert even takes the opportunity of his movie review to shake his finger at Senator James Inhofe, who is the Chairman of the Senate Environmental Committee (but he�s a Republican from Oklahoma, an oil-producing state, so I suppose he represents the big bad oil interests, but since I like driving the 15 miles to work instead of taking half a day to walk it, I, too, would represent the oil interests): Inhofe said, �Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.� Ebert tsk tsk tsks him by writing, �I hope he takes his job seriously enough to see this film.� No, Inhofe takes his job seriously enough to ignore it.
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