Ten Pet Peeves About “Green” Commandments

Came home from work to see a new electric lawn mower. Not thrilled to see it as the cords get cut and they lack power and never seem to do a good job. My spouse tells me this one has more power than the rechargeables and got through the tall grass when he used it. I am sure one of us will slice through the cord, tho. But I know why my spouse got it. He had just got a new lawn mower last year. Gas powered. It was dead by this spring. Ethanol did it in. Which got me thinking about some of the things green jerks have forced on us that do a bad job, cost us more and make life more difficult (and don’t really do that much for the environment anyway). So here’s my current list:

1) Gas with ethanol (destroys small engines, reduces miles per gallon, reduces power of engines, actually is worse for environment than regular gas, results in higher food costs because corn is being used for fuel, promotes misery in Third World and promotes revolution and terrorism.

Read the rest over at my place http://artemisretriever.blogspot.com/2011/05/ten-greenie-pet-peeves.html

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Who’s In Charge?

Remember in middle school when the teacher would be called out of the room for a minute. The time would stretch out and kids would stretch, delighted at the break from being called upon, having to answer tough questions or actually think. And then things started to get out of hand. Somebody decided to stand up and imitate the teacher. This did not suit you. You knew that exam was coming up, and you wanted to do well on it. At least cram a little until the teacher got back…

This picture of our Fearless Reader made me think of a classroom without anyone in charge. You can tell a lot about a person by how they lead, or fail to. And by your own response to them.

And tho I am not myself the world’s best dog trainer, I would NEVER allow a dog of mine to drag me all over the place like this. It’s not good for the person or the dog. What is he thinking?? And what does the dog sense? Dogs are wiser in many ways than some humans…

And if you want them to love you and follow your lead you can’t wow them with word clouds, you have to be consistent, and reliable, and earn their trust. They are good judges of character not rhetoric.

(via Julie Mason at the Washington Examiner http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Dog-Whisperer-to-WH-Ur-doing-it-wrong-104379594.html)

Get Ready For Fall Clean Up

It’s never too early. We are still on vacation, just back from a few days driving to Montreal and a great visit there. The next three days will be chores and errands in the mornings and fun outings in the afternoons before school and work start up again.

Today we could avoid the garden no longer. Choked with noxious weeds. Shaggy. A mess. Poison ivy. Wild roses pricking the unwary. Thistles ditto. Bamboo sending in invading roots from the neighbor’s yard–runners up to thirty feet under my lawn from the fence. And, yes, I use those teachable moments to make heavy-handed political metaphors for the benefit of my groaning offspring…

So, after some heavy duty maternal preaching, seasoned with appeals to family spirit, guilt, veiled threats, and sweetened with the promise of filthy lucre if enough work was accomplished (it’s the American way) the kids and I proceeded outside. Crews of Mexicans at work on our neighbors’ microscopic and manicured yards. This had the effect of arousing a certain competitive spirit in my teen boy.

In an hour we had filled up the back of the Explorer with four huge barrels squished full of wild roses, vines, a dead yew bush, and weeds clipped and uprooted. Mulch had been spread. The front yard looked a lot better. You could see that there was a blueberry bush and blackberry canes in the side yard again (as opposed to eight foot high monsters of vines earlier.

I heard a yelp from my son on the side. He had pulled vigorously at some tall weeds and disturbed a ground nest of yellow jackets. He was too fast for them. I said gently:

“You know, honey bunny, (he is 17 but tolerates such maternal foolishness if NOBODY is around to hear it) it’s like politics. Nasty critters get settled in and don’t like it when you disturb them. They’ll sting you no matter what. You can’t reason with them. So just go do something else, and I’ll deal with them. ”

We finished up fetching and carrying the piles of weeds from the rest of the project, amazed at how the weeds had just sprung up and choked the flowers and vegetables. A little neglect on our part, and things we had planted with high hopes were either dead or stunted.

Again, I nudged him: “This happens in politics and the economy, too…We were sloppy this summer because it was hot, and we were busy with other things, so we didn’t take care of the garden. Well, people are often the same way about their political liberties and keeping track of what those scummy politicians want to do with our money. You can’t be. If we had weeded the garden every time we walked thru it (the way we do most years) it would be fine now. The same with politics. The worst thing in the world for corrupt and authoritarian political leaders is a citizenry that is alert and intelligent and keeping an eye on them.”

“Sheesh, Mom…”

Oh well, subtlety never was my strong point….heheh But I hope all of you are ready to do a LOT of weeding in late fall. Be ruthless! We have a beautiful garden and a lot of pests to root out of it.

Evil Can Be Painless

A study from Britain asserting that fetuses cannot feel pain before 24 weeks, and that abortion before that time should continue to be allowed.

This is specious, IMHO.  Whether or not the poor baby feels pain isn’t what determines the morality of murdering them when they are defenceless.

Equally horrifying, this section from the BBC summary:

It also tried to define what mental and physical abnormalities could result in a “serious handicap”.
Around 1% of abortions are carried out on these grounds. Such terminations can take place after 24 weeks.
In the past, campaigners concerned about the abortion law have argued that this has been interpreted too widely to include relatively minor disabilities.
But the Royal College said in its second report that it would not be practical to try to produce a list of conditions that would constitute serious handicap because it was too difficult to predict the long-term impact of an abnormality on a child or on their family.

Achomawi Indian and child, by Edward Curtis 1923

Again, I am staggered by the banality of evil, and the missing the point.  The assumption in such reports as that one from Britain is that OF COURSE, if a disability is discovered, the parents would choose to abort, and be justified in doing so even later than 24 weeks.

Also, if only 1% of abortions are because of disabilities, what about the other 99 %?   Gender of the child?  Finances?  Convenience?  Marital problems?

I get emotional about this.  My own “accidental” third pregnancy ended in the baby dying in mid pregnancy.  To my husband’s and my great grief (I fell into a terrible depression afterwards).  We were shown the ultrasound of a perfectly formed baby that was deathly still in utero, a few weeks after we had declined prenatal testing because amnio increased the risk of miscarriage and we would not have aborted any child, even if there had been any terrible disability discovered.  When the baby died a few weeks later and we mourned so terribly, I became even more vehemently anti-abortion than before.  The idea that anyone would kill a baby!

Three months later, we were pregnant with our fourth child.  It was a difficult pregnancy, with complications and many extra ultrasounds to be sure that he was alright anyway.  He was eventually born, huge and weighing 8 pounds 10 oz, and healthy and we rejoiced.

We did not discover that he was autistic until he was seven.  It has been difficult raising a disabled child.  But we love him, and can’t imagine life without him.  Especially having lost the baby before him, we would not even have considered having amnio or of aborting him had some other “non invasive” test revealed him to have a disability.  Life is precious, not perfect.

Cross-posted at Retriever.

Going to the Dog

Maggies’ Farm was just a tad unkind about this picture of our Fearless Reader’s management of the Secret Service’s….er….his family’s dog.

Bird Dog snorted:

President Kick Ass cannot even handle a pet dog. Pathetic. Even when my kids were little, they would not put up with that from our dogs. That is now a worthless dog, and it is the owners’ fault. How your dog behaves is a reflection of you and your training – or lack thereof, so analyze this:

Now, I grant you, it seems pretty clear who is the alpha and who is the beta in the above picture. 

The Spill: Science and Slitherin

Lately, I’ve been  transfixed by those pictures of oiled birds and worrying about the effects on the fish and wildlife and wetlands of the spill, and the livelihood of so many people as the oil spill poisons the Gulf.  Every day I tramp around a beach far to the north, that is washed by what I used to think of as a disgustingly polluted body of water, yet photographing astonishingly healthy and vigorous birds.  It’s positively pristine by comparison with the Gulf today.    The science behind the leak has been the last thing on my mind.  It shouldn’t be.

Elisheva Levin at Ragamuffin Studies has a great post up on the science and the slitherin slime politicking around the spill. She reminds us of the perils of glib “environmentalist” policies, enacted by the ignorant.  I remember  something my first science teacher intoned regularly “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Green Religion

There are few people as religiously zealous and puritanical as a leftist environmentalist. Going to school with them, influenced far more than I realized at the time, I still have a sense of sin with each deviation from the green “rules” I absorbed while I was in college and grad school ostensibly getting an education.

From the petty infractions—my preferring Dunkin Donuts’ durable and insulating styrofoam coffee cups that don’t leak or spill or chill to Starbucks’ feeble tho eco chic paper ones—to the larger like enjoying driving a large gas guzzling SUV. Or throwing away containers that I used to re-use repeatedly (tho vaguely disheartened by their cruddiness), or cleaning house now by throwing things away willy nilly instead of spending hours separating trash, taking this to the thrift store…the point is, I wince and find it hard to do such things without feeling guilty. Because they feel sinful..

As a Christian, I am naturally sympathetic to many so called “green” bits of advice. Was raised that God means us to be good stewards. Despite my natural extravagance on hobbies, my family tries to be frugal, and as traditional New Englanders we tend to automatically do all those things coopted by the greenies: use up, make do or do without, most of the time. Not to save Gaia, but to save money for our children’s education or family’s medical care and/or be able to give it away to church and those in need. I grow my own vegetables organically, yadda, yadda, yadda, but these things are means not an end. Tools.

A good piece in City Journal by Benjamin Plotinsky on messianism in totalitarianism and in the election of our current leader, and on how” the left’s radical zealotry increasingly resembles religious experience”

Including this on environmentalism gone wild (h/t Gerard):

Environmentalism does indeed tell its adherents “what to eat” (pesticide-free organic food, preferably grown nearby to cut down on trucking) and “how to travel” (by public transportation or, better yet, bicycle). But it also lays down rules on nearly every aspect of life in a consumer economy: how to wash your clothes (seldom); how to wash yourself (take a shower, not a bath, and use a low-flow showerhead); how to light your house (with fluorescent bulbs); how to choose your TV (look for the Energy Star logo!); how to go to the bathroom (with high-efficiency toilets and recycled paper); how to invest, clean, sleep, and dress (in environmentally friendly companies, with nontoxic chemicals, on sheets made of “sustainable fibers,” and in clothes made of the same); and even how to procreate (Greenpeace has issued a guide to “environmentally friendly sex”).

Just to be a little less cranky and second hand, here are some of the “green” rules I now disobey and why (I did, however, breastfeed all of my kids 24/7 for years, and washed cloth diapers at home and line dried them…so I have been known to be green)::

1) Setting my water thermostat lower. Stopped because the clothes don’t get clean in the wash, the dishes aren’t sterilized properly in the dishwasher.
2) Never spraying anything toxic in the garden: I draw the line at poison ivy and yellow jacket nests near human high-traffic areas. I have also seen a row of hemlock trees die, six rose bushes, numerous rhodendrons, plum, apricot, nectarine and cherry trees get sicker and sicker without sprays. My squash gets destroyed by borers. If I had to support myself and feed myself from my yard, I would starve as pests and diseases are real and destructive. I avoid chemicals to the extent possible, but will now practice IPM.
3) Using low energy lightbulbs: they make people look greenish and ruin indoor nighttime photos
4) Commuting to work by bike. I used to do this when I was young and single and didn’t have children to support and educate. These days my life is more valuable to others. ALso, it is completely unsafe bicycling around here.
5) Saving everything to reuse sometime (one only has so much space, and clutter is a fire hazard).
6) Buying large containers of things to reduce packaging. Packaging helps in portion control and preventing breakage and spoilage.
7) Composting all yard waste: weeds and their seeds and tubers, etc. cannot all be destroyed in a compost pile
8) Low flow toilets: do not flush properly.
9) Eating less animal protein and more complex carbs: animal protein improves mood and brain functioning, and you get less fat on it than on a starchy diet.
11) Feeding a large dog when there are starving kids in the world. The dog is my security system, therapist, pest repellent and best friend all in one. If I am happier because my dog loves me, I will spend less money on useless toys for myself.

That’s enough for now. How about you…

Now I’m going to go have a long, hot shower, with all the lights blazing in the house, and the heat on because it is 35 degrees out, and do anything else I can think of to thumb my nose at those who would tell me what to do and how to do it. Because I worship no one, and follow no rule of life except those laid down by a man whose initials are J.C.

Shrinking Politicians

Pun intended. We are ruled by mediocrities who think they are Great Men. Sweaters that have been thru the wash. But also, the temptation to psychoanalyze politicians from a distance, by experts as well as by self-styled experts on people…

To begin: We are ruled by moral Lilliputians these days. People who think that reading it makes it so. Beyond Louis XIV’s 
“l’Etat c’est moi!” to the notion that the ruler not only IS the state but also can predict the future of the state, and make magic with the state, and defy the fiscal gravity of the state. So, we can pass health care a week after concealing our own government’s reports that it would cost more. And continue to say how wonderful.

As I watched our President crowing over his health care squeak to a majority, I found myself eerily reminded of Baron Harkonnen in the sci fi movie “Dune” after he has survived a recent assassination attempt. The huge villain is supported by anti gravity rockets that suspend him in air and he zips around the top of the room “I’m alive!” maniacally cackling. Maybe I watch too much sci fi. Maybe I should get out more?

I know, I know. It is unfair to blame that man and other politicians for all the moral ills afflicting our country now. Small people. Perhaps we have got the leaders we deserve, perhaps we didn’t work hard enough to fight the rascals and persuade good people to serve or should have served ourself. It’s the small size of the conscience of our current leaders that bothers me more than their party affiliation. The head of the RNC, for example, is doing more to help liberals right now than anybody…he should step down for the good of the conservative cause.

In other spheres (tho they give so much to political campaigns that it isn’t really separate), in a NYT story about pumping out the Goldman mess in the hearings http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/business/28goldman.html?hp :

“A Republican member, Senator Susan M. Collins of Maine, turned from one witness to the next as she asked repeatedly whether they felt a duty to act in the best interest of their clients. Only one of the four witnesses she questioned seemed to affirm such a duty outright. “

Kind of echoes a President who pushes agendas that the majority of his population do not support. And no shame about it…Summing up how it is modelled from the White House, Dewey from Detroit has a nice post up about “The Arrogant, Dismissive, even Derisive – President Obama”. http://www.deweyfromdetroit.com/2010/04/arrogant-dismissive-even-derisive.html At least we can vote his followers out in November, and get rid of him the next Presidential election.

But it is not just we are hectored, jeered at, mugged, manipulated and our life’s savings fleeced by moral pygmies these days. It’s worse.

Most of us find ourselves sometimes wondering uneasily about the mental balance, the personalities and character of our leaders. They don’t just have gall, some of them seem to have a basic disconnect from reality or any sense of social or other consequences. As the leader of the free world waffles unable to string coherent sentences together, one wonders what some of them are on. In practice, we all do it. I have to constantly fight the temptation to apply what I have learned from books and life about psychology to the rascals claiming to represent us. They are such flagrant cases.

The study that started this whole exercise in analyzing from a distance was this:

Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study

Neuroskeptic had a good discussion of the loose tossing around of psychiatric labels as terms of abuse. http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2010/04/im-bipolar-youre-schizophrenic.html I didn’t agree with his conclusion that it is pc to object to such use of the terms. When people toss around racist epithets, they get in serious trouble, so why is mental disorder less deserving of polite treatment than race? But the point is that our culture has incorporated so much watered down psych jargon that it affects our view of everything, including our moral and political assessments.

We start doing this labelling and dismissing young. Either dishing it out, or miserably bracing against it. The taunts on the school bus “Loser…psycho…that’s so gay…weirdo…you have issues…” turn into “well, he’s different…” once they are in middle school and high school and have been forced to attend workshops on diversity, anti-harassment, how words hurt, etc. But the dis is the same. Grownups will call someone a wack job, lunatic, psycho, retarded, moron, or whisper to a confidante that someone else is. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop certain males from accessing porn.

Whatever your politics, Doctor X is a blogging psychologist who is remarkably restrained about this rush to diagnosis of public figures. He has a good post up discussing the latest criticism of Charles Krauthammer (psychiatrist and political commentator) for his off the cuff dismissals of assorted leftists and certain elected fat cats as needing meds. http://drx.typepad.com/psychotherapyblog/2010/04/diagnosing-public-figures.html He cites a liberal blog post on the subject, but the points are valid regardless of one’s political allegiance. Pathologizing the psychology (and values) of conservatives is just as prevalent these days as that of leftists.

But my own favorite political commentator put it even more pithily

“ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Luke 6:41.

Cross-posted today over at my site, Retriever: http://artemisretriever.blogspot.com/