My favorite Strip

And I’m not talking about the Las Vegas “Strip” here now.






I’m with Calvin on this one. Sometimes I wish George and I could just fly off to another planet.
This is a true classic “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip that makes it...well...classic.



Okay, people, can we please get on with it and start saving this planet of ours? It’s not like there are too many of these floating around in space.

Bill Maher Again

The following is from the April 3rd, 2009 broadcast of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher." Like I mentioned in an earlier post, we just love Bill Maher.


Of course, the other seemingly limitless expanse we've endangered lately is the ocean, which we are killing. Why? Because the Bible says God gave us dominion over the earth, which is taken to mean that God was saying, "This is your rental car. Taketh it and beateth the shit out of it!" "Who careth? It is a rental!"

Did you know that there is now floating in the Pacific Ocean a 3.5-million ton island of shit made up of all the indestructible crap we toss away, the stuff that will never break down, like Styrofoam and old Clorox bottles. And it's twice the size of Texas. That's right, the Pacific Ocean now contains more white trash than Texas!

Marine biologists call it the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," and say it is so out of control that it can't be cleaned up, and it's going to be with us forever, just taking up space and killing wildlife. Like a giant Sarah Palin.

Required Reading

The following opinion piece should be required reading for Americans, especially politicians. But maybe our two presidential candidates are more worried about their celebrity status than talking about and dealing with real issues? The text below is from the New York Times.


Op-Ed Columnist
Flush With Energy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: August 9, 2008

Thomas L. Friedman
(Photo by Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Copenhagen

The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons — maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!

A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.

What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)

There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.

“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”

Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

A version of this article appeared in print on August 10, 2008, on page WK11 of the New York edition.

Earth and AIDS

First off, today is Earth Day.

Two of many things most Americans aren’t too concerned with is the horrible state which our environment is in and the unequal status of the LGBT community in the United States.

Doing our part in conserving energy, recycling and taking care of the earth is a no-brainer. If the air is too polluted to breath, the water too toxic to drink and our food supply too genetically modified to cause more harm in the long run, what else is there? Do we eat dollar bills? Drink the last remaining drops of fossil fuel? It’s not that hard to understand that the human race depends on a clean environment to survive. It’s very simple really.

George and I recycle. We have replaced most of our indoor and outdoor incandescent light bulbs with more energy-efficient fluorescent ones, and we car pool every day. We don’t turn the heater or air-conditioner on until absolutely necessary. Even during the summer desert heat we have our thermostat set at 84 degrees. Otherwise we’d be working only to pay for mortgage and the already way too high power bill. It’s mind of matter.

The other issue, which is rather alarming, is the fact that people of the LGBT community in the U.S. are becoming third class citizens. For whom exactly does "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," as it is stated in the United States Declaration of Independence, apply to then? Only to rich white guys? Some people want to vote for a federal amendment to ban same-sex marriage. What business is it of heterosexual people whom gays or lesbians love and want to spend their lives with? What gives them the right to take away the right of other people? Not too long ago in this country, women would not even have been allowed to vote on this subject. Or any subject, for that matter. Imagine that, certain white straight people had no equal rights at one point in history of the United States.

Then there is the whole debacle how HIV infected people are being treated and how AIDS in general is being used as a smear campaign by some right-wing, religious fanatics against anything gay or lesbian. The fact that HIV is not only affecting homosexuals, but also heterosexual people, including women and children, is conveniently swept under the rug. The claim that AIDS is a gay disease is not only a lie but also ignorant. And while the endless debates and finger pointing over whether it is an abomination and who to blame rages on; countless people continue to suffer. With no cure in sight, without help or compassion.

One of the few things that help to bring some kind of relief are events such as the annual Las Vegas AIDS Walk, which was held on Sunday. The money raised will help the AFAN (Aid for AIDS of Nevada) organization to provide support and advocacy for adults and children living with and affected by HIV/AIDS in southern Nevada.

George and I participated in the walk, as we did last year. It’s our little contribution to a great cause and it’s usually fun too. Some people came in costumes. Many families with children were taking part as well. And as always, there were lots of dogs. Countless dogs in every size and shape were present. The weather cooperated too. It was sunny and very comfortable. Below are some photos of Sunday’s event.

This is actually a picture from last year's AIDS Walk in Las Vegas. Here we are with one of the Sin Sity Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.