Another Great Disgrace in U.S. History

Time Magazine's August 13th issue leads with a cover highlighting just how pathetic the situation in New Orleans is. One of the United States greatest cities was abandoned by the country that should have been there to help its residents and its culture and history. Instead we watched, made a spectacle and otherwise abandoned the people, the wonder, and the mystic that makes New Orleans what it is. All the while we shipped U.S. citizens overseas to fight a war that was ill contrived at best, cost billions of dollars and has disrupted a fragile region of the world.

The current government, correction the current presidential administration and its cronies are to blame for these atrocities. The U.S. public is to blame to for not holding responsible those that have lead us down the wrong paths, while overlooking the needs of the people we are most responsible to.

Another set of stories and images about another U.S. tragedy. Will the U.S. wake up, will we solve these problems or will we ignore those things around us while we revel in our own gluttony?

Walked Lately?

Visit the walk score website to see how well your home or office location rates in terms of walkability. This is a great way to evaluate one of the green or not so green aspects of the places you spend a lot of your time. I'm excited to know that my new home scores a 66, and not surprised that my office scored an eight.

How well did you do and will you walk?

Keepin it real!

Gabriel Delahaye: The G-8 Protesters Are Clowns

from The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed by Gabriel Delahaye

The annual G-8 Summit is well underway in Heiligendamm, and as is de rigeur with the anarchist middle-to-upper-middle-class white kids of the world, the meeting of the world's leaders is being protested. Fine. I understand the aversion that the Avril Lavignes of the world feel towards globalization and a free-market economy, but the part that I don't get is why they are confused that no one takes them seriously.

A motley band of more than 800 protesters -- some sporting fluorescent wigs and clown noses -- scampered through woods and across fields to evade police patrols Wednesday and reach the barbed-wire fence sealing off the Group of Eight summit.

Oh, good work. Nothing says "take me seriously, I have important views on the geopolitical situation that need to be heard" like CLOWN COSTUMES.

You know, just because you think George Bush is an asshole, it doesn't make you not an asshole.

Maybe when you are finished squeezing out of your Clown Peugeot, you can take your protest to Kid Nation. I think that a bunch of nine-year-olds drunk off of nickel root beers would be really open to the idea that parents just don't understand.

Pictures for words...

1 picture = 1000 words

from Philanthropy 2173 by Lucy Bernholz

We all know the old saw about a picture being worth a thousand words. As Chris Jordan's new photography exhibit shows, that same picture might also be worth:

• The 8 million trees harvested monthly for US mail order catalogs;
• 2 million plastic bottles used every 5 minutes;
• 11,000 jet trails over the US every 8 hours;
• 426,000 cell phones thrown out daily;
• 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every 5 seconds; or
  
• 29,569 handguns, one for every gun death in the US in 2004.

Check out the photos. If you are in New York between June 14 and July 31 check it out in person. The photos really do justice to these sobering statistics.

If only he had a picture of the 260 billion dollars Americans gave to charity last year (at least some of which was intended to address the problems shown in the other photos).

The picture above depicts eight million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.

Another crook!

Interior Official Steps Down Over Rules Violation

Deputy assistant secretary at the Interior Department, Julie A. MacDonald, resigned after accusations that she violated Federal rules by giving industry access to sensitive documents and even altering the results of agency scientists' work. While environmental advocates welcome this news, the mitigation community is also likely to be happy that environmental regulation will be rigorously enforced.

Read the New York Times article

Another Brick in the Wall

Apparently whatever the Bush administration can't defeat outright they like to wall in. Bag News Notes reported on walls being erected in Baghdad to keep feuding factions apart and we are fairly familiar with the Administration's interest in putting up a fence from the Pacific to the Gulf to keep our friends from Mexico from coming north. Something about regressing back to the 1940's seems to be going on here...

The war rages on...

This from the New York Times...

Meanwhile we continued to be seemingly completely distracted by our domestic issues...

In the worst of the attacks, a car bomb exploded at an intersection in the Sadriya neighborhood that serves as a station for buses traveling to the Shiite district of Sadr City. The powerful blast killed at least 115 people and wounded 137.