an oldie but a goodie.

Now I don’t believe in anything!

I watched The Dark Knight a few evenings ago and enjoyed it, especially the creepy performance by Heath Ledger. But did anyone else catch the wiretapping propaganda? Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional wiretapping bill is promoted by batman in the new film. Like Bush’s bill, the gross suspension of civil liberties is appropriate under extreme circumstances. This plays out in the film when a citizen stands and says “things have never been worse!”

The character Morgan Freeman plays further legitimizes the bill when he agrees to use it “just this one time.” The message here is, “don’t worry, we’ll spy on you only when we have to…and by the way, we get to decide when it is important.” Still most Americans are against this bill. So Batman, by violating the law (like the Bush admin), is the hero we deserve–even if we “have to chase him.”

This blogger writes more about this issue and even compares Bush’s–oops I mean Batman’s– law-bending-behavior with the failed attempt of fighting lawlessness with lawlessness, employed by character Harvey Dent.

The Los Angeles City Council voted Tuesday to ban plastic carryout bags in the city’s supermarkets and stores by July 2010

I know Sustainability Manager Nicole Woodman, and other members of Flagstaff’s City Council have been working on a similar plastic bag ban. It needs to go much further than plastic bags though. In my book, if it can’t be recycled or reused, it should never be mass produced. I wrote about all this before.
Here is a good cnn piece on the affects of plastic bag usage world-wide.

Meanwhile insane groups like savetheplasticbag.com are popping up in response. Check out this stupid cartoon.

Acrylamides? I thought we were talking about plastic bags. I don’t think our food should have carcinogens either, but this kind of ‘bait and switch’ argument attempts to make one bad idea irrelevant in comparison to worse ideas. It’s an easy way for one to take the focus off of someone else’s argument and then move the conversation somewhere else. AND it’s pretty demeaning to see caffeine on the same evil plane as cancer-causing agents in our food and water.

I think I trash talk the midwest too much. I’m home visiting my parents and these have been highlights…

lightening bugs!

thick forests (where it hasn’t been cut…)

corn (sorry AZ, you’ve got nothing on the corn they have here)

eating peppermint ice cream and watching Nazis’be sentenced to death in the Nuremburg Trials on dad’s History Channel WWII box set

finding an old fugazi cd

reading a ghost story I wrote in 6th grade

helping the parents decide what kind of bicycles to buy

I thought this was worth mentioning…

The United Arab Emirates has cancelled the entire debt owed to it by Iraq – a sum of almost $7bn (£3.5bn) including interest and arrears.