HONOLULU

The federal government wants to extend by five years its rules allowing the Navy to use a new low-frequency sonar, despite objections from environmentalists that the technology may harm whales and dolphins.

There is actually a lot of evidence that sonar kills whales and dolphins.

Wins?

I thought Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon” was fantastic. Horror fans will appreciate the humor.

Last week, after having a few beers with Sarah, I was on Beaver, waiting at a stop light at Butler. It was about 12:30am and there were hardly any cars in the area. A older white sedan, pulled up and it’s passengers threw eggs at me. Luckily none of them hit me. One of them hit my handlebars. I was totally stunned, then immediately wished I had a rock. They were gone before I could grab one.

Then a few days ago, I was talking with another rider who had been hit by a rock in the neck just that afternoon! He showed me the marks. It gets worse. He has a friend who was hit with a glass beer bottle the week prior. Apparently it broke across his back.

Just last night I was riding down San Fran in the downtown area and a white suburban, full of younger party kids, pulled up next to me. This dude a few years younger than me started giving me a bunch of crap; when the light changed, the suburban harassed me by slamming on his break, fake turning, swerving…etc. It started driving really slow, expecting me to pass (probably so they could throw something at me), but I just decided to take another route.

Bikers! What can we do here? I see, maybe, a couple of options. My roommate said I should call the police so that it’s on record. But that wouldn’t really make you feel better. Another idea we came up with was just memorize the car, the license number if you can. This town isn’t that big. You’d be sure to stumble upon it in a parking lot sooner or later, especially if you really looked for it.

I guess the last option would be to fight back, which was my inclination at the moment (and that was because of eggs…I can’t imagine how it must feel to get hit with a rock or a bottle). I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody in the car, unless of course they hurt me bad enough, in which case maybe revenge might not be on my mind. Nonetheless, bikers get harassed, I think because of a power relationship that develops on the road, and because of car culture. It might also be rooted in the same mentality that feeds anti-intellectualism in this country. Both of these are related to constructions of masculinity in our culture, whereby any sense of community, a healthy lifestyle, or being conscious of energy and resource consumption, is feminized. By showing power over a biker in a violent way, the threat to their own insecurities is floored and there is no question as to where on the Kinsey scale they would measure up. I mean, this is other men, and performances of strictly defined masculinity that we’re talking about here, right?

What if, instead of stories where some dudes in a car harass bikers and continue to harass bikers, the reputation was such that people were afraid to harass bikers because it was known that each one packs a good throwing rock under their seat. If those jerks in the Suburban threw a rock at my neck, for example, and I immediately broke out their back window, do you think that would deter them from such activities again? Maybe my retaliation would start a war on bikers. I don’t know. I know it would feel great though.

This whole Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis thing this weekend is the most rediculous thing I’ve ever heard. The dominant culture is destroying the planet and our response is a benefit concert?

The website says, “commit to change today and see your name on the Live Earth Stage”

Being green has never been so fashionable!

The website’s “green tip of the day” is: Keep your air conditioning inside this summer. Check for window drafts by carefully holding an incense stick up to each frame and watch the smoke to see if there is a leak.

The website asks us: “How many light bulbs will you pledge to switch?”…sponsored by Philips (sense and sensibility)

Is this really how we’re addressing global warming? Each green tip functions as yet another way to keep us in denial as the real world burns. But I suppose they’ll assuage our guilt and make us feel better about ourselves, which is really the main point.

AND…the whole thing is sponsored by Chevrolet? WTF? (see, Car Culture Will Never Be Sustainable)

AND…they’re asking for donations! How much money does it actually cost to remove dams, stop industrial logging, stop the murder of the oceans, stop the industrial economy, and stop industrial agriculture and factory farms? Of course any donation recieved is not going to go toward any project associated with deindustrialization. Your cash will, no doubt, go to pay for musician/publicity expenses or to pay for the printing of stupid little pamphlets that will tell you to recycle, use less hot water, buy hybrid cars, and vote for the right politicians. Way to save the f-ing planet.

My dictionary defines “farce” as “foolish show; mockery; a ridiculous sham.” There is also a big fat picture of thousands of people attending Live Earth.

BUT…if you want to go, Mad Italian Bar & Grill (101 S San Fransisco St.) is hosting the whole thing. That’s right, you too can drink beer and watch TV AND save the planet!

Open to the public….$5 suggested donation, which I’m going to suggest they shove up their ass. I promise I’ll make a lot of friends when I talk to people wasting their time at info-tables, as they try to figure out which light bulb is the most eco-friendly.

I appreciate the increased awareness about global warming, but all these green tips, greenwashing, and green branding function to keep people in denial and, therefore, I believe they cause more harm than good; they keep people believing that nothing fundamental about the way we live on this planet has to change. We’ll follow the school into the net, all the while fully rationalizing a deeply insane lifestyle that is killing everything, including our selves.

We need people to show up at the Mad Italian to talk to people. Raise hell. Tell them you’re not buying it. I know I’ll be there.

Yo, The Noise hit the streets of Flagstaff today and I’m stoked because, after taking two months off, I finally have something in it. Remember that anti-car manifesto I wrote a couple weeks back? Well, I weaved in the graphic retelling of my car accident and threw in a few lame jokes to boot. It is now called: “Car Culture will Never Be Sustainable, So Shut Up Already.” Serious.

I would post it here, but I feel like it would come off as repeat material. And that’s a bit slap-dash for me.

I already took the liberty of posting it on my myspace account, so you can read it there. Afterwards, we can talk about how many more friends you have than I do.

…and yes, I realize the irony of a white guy posting this. I guess I’m patriotic enough to admit that, yes I love this land, but it was never ours to claim. 

A few weeks ago, I posted a handout from The MARS Project on how homophobia hurts us all. To compliment that post, I wanted to post a paragraph from Michael Kimmel’s essay on “Masculinity as Homophobia.”

Homophobia is more than the irrational fear of gay men, more than the fear that we might be perceived as gay. ‘The word “faggot” has nothing to do with homosexual experience or even with fears of homosexuals,’ writes David Leverenz (1986). ‘It comes out of the depths of manhood: a label of ultimate contempt for anyone who seems sissy, untough, uncool’ (p. 455). Homophobia is the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men. We are afraid to let other men see that fear. Fear makes us ashamed, because the recognition of fear in ourselves is proof to ourselves that we are not as manly as we pretend, that we are, like the young man in a poem by Yeats, ‘one that ruffles in a manly pose for all his timid heart.” Our fear is the fear of humiliation. We are ashamed to be afraid.

From the Daily Sun

It may sound a little crude or unreal, but the city of Flagstaff could be the first U.S. city to power its cars from a fuel derived from what residents flush down their toilets.

City officials are evaluating whether to spend nearly $500,000 next year to test a machine that is supposed to turn sewage sludge into heat, liquid fertilizer and a hydrogen-based fuel to power government vehicles.

The device, which is not in operation anywhere else in the United States, would essentially burn some of the biosolids left over from the sewage treatment process at Flagstaff’s Rio de Flag plant by putting the waste through a 10,000-degree electric arc.