Conflict: competitive or opposing action of incompatibles: antagonistic state or action. Pornography: (3): the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction. What else could it be, other than conflict pornography, when a major media source unnecessarily frames a story in such…
Those who are truly interested in community-building (rather than striving to enhance their own status through resource-exhausting displays of material wealth) might want to take note of two ways city folks play in water. This idea occurred to me while walking through Tower Grove Park in St. Louis last week.…
I wrote about complacency once before. I focused on the complacency of most Americans in the face of the energy crisis that is clearly upon us. We have no assurance that gasoline won’t double or triple in price over the next five or 10 years, throwing our economy into a massive depression. With stakes like these, you would think that prolific energy wasters like us would immediately jump on our energy consumption problem by enacting a national conservation plan to cut our petroleum use in half. This could be accomplished by modifying our wasteful energy usage in dozens of ways. For instance, we really could carpool. We could build up our mass transit systems and encourage their use. We could walk and bike more. We could make our homes much more energy-efficient. Instead of building new homes in existing farm fields, we could renovate homes that already exist. While we’re at it, we could cut our use of all other forms of energy in half too. For instance, the technology already exists to make zero-carbon footprint buildings.
Others have written extensively regarding many methods by which we could reduce energy use. Due to the widely accepted law of supply and demand, cutting our use of energy would also have the effect of lowering the price of energy (relative to whatever it would have been had we not taken such measures), thereby diminishing the financial damage from our perennial trade deficits and budget deficits.
My concern is that so many people …
Why would we elect one of the prisoners at Guantanamo as the next President of the United States? Well, the logic is becoming quite clear to anyone who has followed the corporate news media for the past few days. Prisoners at Guantanamo have that special ingredient that John McCain has that makes him an especially good candidate to be president. He was a prisoner and he was tortured! According to many pundits, this confined torture makes McCain a better candidate than Barack Obama.
What provoked this discussion? Recent statements of Wesley Clark that John McCain’s military service doesn’t make him better qualified to be President:
He hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron . . . I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.
Please note, however, Clark’s additional words indicating that Clark nonetheless honored McCain’s military service:
I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands of millions of others in the Armed Forces as a prisoner of war. He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and he has traveled all over the world.” Clark continued: “But he hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in Air — in the Navy that he commanded, it wasn’t a wartime squadron. He hasn’t been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn’t …
If you'd like your young daughter to be the next Dream Girl USA, take a look at this photo essay published by the St. Louis Riverfront Times. The National Little Miss Dream Girl Pageant gave this photographer wide access to many aspects of the pageant. These photos contained in the…