arse poetica

We Could All Use a Snuggle

What utter loves. The cuteness was so overwhelming that I took about 1,200 pictures of this from every conceivable angle. This one will do. Love how Kate's front leg and paw look so big. Ha.

How to Win the War on Global Warming

Instead of crawling under the bed w/ a bottle of the strongest stuff I can find and bemoaning the utter horrible destructive insane waste of the last 8+ years, I'm ready to look ahead to a time when we might have a president w/ a brain, some integrity, and a vision of positive government. It could happen.

Considering the looming environmental crisis, we've got to get serious fast.

How to Win the War on Global Warming.

[F]or a country that rightly cites patriotism as one of its core values, we're taking a pass on what might be the most patriotic struggle of all. It's hard to imagine a bigger fight than one for the survival of the country's coasts and farms, the health of its people and the stability of its economy—and for those of the world at large as well.

The rub is, if the vast majority of people increasingly agree that climate change is a global emergency, there's far less consensus on how to fix it. Industry offers its plans, which too often would fix little. Environmentalists offer theirs, which too often amount to naive wish lists that could cripple America's growth. But let's assume that those interested parties and others will always be at the table and will always—sensibly—demand that their voices be heard and that their needs be addressed. What would an aggressive, ambitious, effective plan look like—one that would leave us both environmentally safe and economically sound?

Forget precedents like the Manhattan Project, which developed the atom bomb, or the Apollo program that put men on the moon—single-focus programs both, however hard they were to pull off. Think instead of the overnight conversion of the World War II�era industrial sector into a vast machine capable of churning out 60,000 tanks and 300,000 planes, an effort that not only didn't bankrupt the nation but instead made it rich and powerful beyond its imagining and—oh, yes—won the war in the process.

Halting climate change will be far harder than even that. One of the more conservative plans for addressing the problem, by Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala of Princeton University, calls for a reduction of 25 billion tons of carbon emissions over the next 50 years—the equivalent of erasing nearly four years of global emissions at today's rates. And yet by devising a coherent strategy that mixes short-term solutions with farsighted goals, combines government activism with private-sector enterprise and blends pragmatism with ambition, the U.S. can, without major damage to the economy, help halt the worst effects of climate change and ensure the survival of our way of life for future generations. Money will get us part of the way there, but what's needed most is will. "I'm not saying the challenge isn't almost overwhelming," says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund and co-author of the new book Earth: The Sequel. "But this is America, and America has risen to these challenges before."

Read further for recommendations. Share with friends. I really think that this is one of those issues on which Americans can find common ground. I've given up on the apocalypse-loving weirdos and the intractable capitalists, but it's possible that we could reach even them. Hopefully that pull-together spirit hasn't completely left us (though, to be honest, I do despair).

Maybe this will help: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic.

Worst.President.Ever.

Harper’s: “Worst. President. Ever.”

“It would be difficult to identify a President who, facing major international and domestic crises, has failed in both as clearly as President Bush,” concluded one respondent. “His domestic policies,” another noted, “have had the cumulative effect of shoring up a semi-permanent aristocracy of capital that dwarfs the aristocracy of land against which the founding fathers rebelled; of encouraging a mindless retreat from science and rationalism; and of crippling the nation’s economic base.”

[snip]

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”

“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the
next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

I don't even know who to shake my fist at first.

Come, Armageddon, Come

Is Murkan culture is sustainable? It perpetuates the lone (male) hero myth, normalizes adolescent obsessions, and at least representationally subjugates all who do not fit in prior categories. Can it possibly bear out in our collective experience that the only honorable brave intelligent dedicated folks among us are lone white guys? It's so tired. I'm done.

"In a new subplot added by the filmmakers, the mayor of Whoville has 96 daughters. He has one son. Guess who gets all his attention? Guess who saves the day? Go ahead, think about it, I'll wait ... Boys get to save the world, and girls get to stand there and say, I knew you could do it. How did they know he could do it? Maybe because they watched every other movie ever made?"

--Peter Sagal, father of three daughters and host of National Public Radio’s “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” in a commentary on NPR about the new big-screen adaptation of “Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who!”

Peter Sagal is my new BFF of all time.

[via Broadsheet]

DO.NOT.GET.ME.STARTED.

Why do I keep thinking one day I will wake up in a world that does not obsess over women and their wanting to assert control over their own lives and bodies?

Health Database Was Set Up to Ignore ‘Abortion’.

Johns Hopkins University said Friday that it had programmed its computers to ignore the word “abortion” in searches of a large, publicly financed database of information on reproductive health after federal officials raised questions about two articles in the database. The dean of the Public Health School lifted the restrictions after learning of them.

[snip]

Mr. Parsons said the development agency had expressed concern after finding “two articles about abortion advocacy” in the database. The articles, he said, did not fit database criteria and were removed.

Quoi? What f*cking criteria would that be? Suffocating fetishist godbag mania to control women? Oh yeah, that.

Employees who manage the database instructed their computers to ignore the word “abortion” as a search term.

After learning of the restrictions on Friday, the dean, Dr. Michael J. Klag, said: “I could not disagree more strongly with this decision, and I have directed that the Popline administrators restore ‘abortion’ as a search term immediately. I will also launch an inquiry to determine why this change occurred.”

[snip]

Dr. Klag said the school was “dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, and not its restriction.”

Ted Miller, a spokesman for Naral Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights group, said: “The public has a right to know why someone would censor relevant medical information. The Bush administration has politicized science as part of an ideological agenda. So it’s important to know if that occurred here.”

Let me save you some trouble, NARAL (and why the F does the NYT insist on not capitalizing its acronyms?): The Bush administration politicized science as part of an ideological agenda serving hysterical fetishist godbags who seek at every turn to impose their pathetic controlling fantasies on the bodies of all women. Not to put too fine a point on it.

RIP, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The Last Days of Martin Luther King Photo Essay.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

Heckuva Job, Bushie

81% in Poll Say Nation Is Headed on the Wrong Track.

Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll.

In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002.

Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems.

A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off.

It was not reported if that 4% worked at Halliburton and its subsidiaries.

Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe

This level of observation and whimsy just makes me want to hug the whole world.

[via]

Sidewalk Psychiatry

Candy Chang - Public Art - Sidewalk Psychiatry.

A routine trip can prompt reflections on everything from future goals to last night’s dinner conversation. As people sacrifice personal time for hectic schedules, these casual occasions for reflection become all the more important.

Sidewalk Psychiatry encourages self-evaluation in transit by posing critical questions on the pavements of New York City. Now your daily ponderings and emotional problems can be prodded and treated on the go - and, best of all, it's free of charge!

[via Wooster Collective]