Thought for Today

I have a dream that in the New World, we will add an eleventh commandment to the standard ten: Thou shalt not bore God.

So says Rob Brezsny

Saving Energy and Other Depressing Matters

Recently a friend and I watched the video Kilowatt Ours. I don’t want to hear any more she said. “I’m starting to feel too depressed and guilty. I feel guilty about throw-away containers at Dairy Queen.” I don’t yet feel guilty about Dairy Queen, but I’m feeling about my electrical my electrical vampires (answering machines, cordless phones, and all of those machines that constantly suck electricity). Today I bought a programmable thermostat and low-energy light bulbs.

Now, I’m studying gasoline saving strategies from Click and Clack. Guilt be gone!

Got $79.50?

My students and I have been critiquing popular culture. Here is a description from the Abercrombie Fitch website (http://www.abercrombie.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_10051_10901_1_-1_12236) about their latest jeans:

Kilburn Destroyed Low Rise Boot [jean]
$79.50
100% cotton, sits low below your waist, inconsistently scarred with handcrafted abrasions, over worn fading, blown out holes, random paint splatters, dirt and grass stains, button fly, Destroyed Wash, Low Rise Boot Fit, Imported

Can It Be? Can We Think Like This?

Neil Postman says, "The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other."

More pithy quotations can be found at http://www.brainyquote.com/

Save, Save, Save

Sunday I viewed the video Kilowatt Ours. It offers some great tips for saving energy in your home. However, much of it is about the environmental destruction of some southern states where mountains are destroyed to mine coal. It was disturbing, and I plan to change to lower energy light bulbs right away and purchase a lower energy refrigerator soon. More information is available at http://www.kilowattours.org/index.php.

Public Views

I saw this sign this morning on my way to work: "Trickle down economics—Please, don’t pee on my head and tell me it’s rain!" It was at the Saint Joseph Valley Building Trades Building on North Side Blvd.

On a car the other day, I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Wage Peace."

Paranoid or Pronoid?

In one of his books, the Dalai Lama challenges readers to go just ten minutes without having a negative thought about another person. When I told this to my acquaintance Arthur, he said, "What a simplistic, overrated fraud that Dalai Lama dude is. It's totally easy to go ten minutes without dissing someone." Your assignment, Libra, is to submit to a marathon version of the challenge: See if you can go seven whole days without having a negative thought about anyone. His Holiness implies there's a good selfish reason for doing so: It helps you cultivate a state of mind in which peaceful contentment is a natural condition.

The above is my horoscope for today according to Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology. He site also promotes pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. “A ‘pronoiac’ is someone who believes that the world is conspiring to shower him or her with blessings.” You can see more at http://www.freewillastrology.com/home.shtml

Can We Blame It on Racism?

From "How the GOP Conquered the South" by Michael Nelson in The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2005, B14.

The greatest change in American national politics of the past 60 years has been the transformation of the South from the most solidly Democratic to the most solidly Republican region of the country. In the 1930s and 1940s, Democrats enjoyed a strong advantage in presidential elections because they could count on winning the 127 electoral votes cast by the 11 states of the old confederacy…

Consider how much has changed. In 2004 John F. Kerry ran up a 252-133 electoral-vote lead over George W. Bush outside the South but lost the election because the Sough went 153-0 for Bush. In the current Congress, although Democrats from non-Southern states outnumber Republican non-Southerners by 41-37 in the senate and 154-150 in the House, the GOP has converted its Southern majorities—82-49 in the House and 18-4 in the Senate—into control of both chambers.

Why the Silence?

In this morning's paper, Gwynne Dyer talks about Iraq milestones, one of course that the 2,000th American soldier has died. Here is one of his reasons for the silence:

...Americans who are dying in Iraq are poor people's kids, and most poor people don't know how to organize and network politically. If there is no draft to threaten the lives of middle-class kids, there won't be a big anti-war movement.

I don't know if I want a draft, but it would give us a more diverse force, and that would be good.