Mark's Views, Perhaps — from behind my eyeballs
Oregon tax activist says she deserves to pay more
| “I deserve to be taxed, and if you give the wealthy a tax benefit, you’re going to be giving it to me — and I don’t need it,” she says. |
Ma’am, here are my two helpful suggestions:
Thank you for considering this. 8)
You can help protect someone else’s property…as well as their right to free speech. 🙄
| Anyone thinking of swiping an Obama/Biden ’08 sign from a front lawn in Portland might want to consider this: The world may be watching.
A Portland woman known as “Poverty Kids’ Teacher” has created an Internet sensation with a webcam that’s streaming video around the clock of the political signs in her yard. No, it’s not another artsy viral campaign in support of the Democratic ticket. It’s one woman’s response to thieves taking her political signs when she wasn’t looking this month. |
Wait a minute! That’s an $8 sign?! 😯
If a campaign wants me to display their sign, why should I pay for it?
That’s dumb.
Source: The O
The Good Ole Boys network, that is:
| Jaime Nared, the 12-year-old Beaverton-area basketball sensation who was banned from a boys team in spring, earned a big win Thursday afternoon after a lawyer threatened to take her case to another kind of court. |
She’s still banned from any boys’ team.
But she’s been allowed on the new coed team.
After all, no court of law and no suer and no lawyer and no threats can change this reality: A boys’ team is comprised of boys only.
Or to frame it up another way, if one or more girls are part of a team that includes boys, it is not a boys’ team.
Going veggie can slash your carbon footprint: study
|
Giving up meat could drastically reduce your carbon footprint, with meat-eaters’ diets responsible for almost twice the emissions of those of vegetarians, a German study said on Tuesday. A diet with meat is responsible for producing in a year the same amount of greenhouse gases as driving a mid-sized car 4,758 kilometres (2,956 miles), the Institute for Ecological Economy Research (IOeW) said. But the food a vegetarian consumes in 12 months is responsible for generating the same emissions as driving 2,427 kilometres, the IOeW said in a study commissioned by independent consumer protection group Foodwatch. |
😆
OK, I’m sure that’s a serious study. But I still think it’s kinda funny.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about the “photo” at the top, it goes with this story:
|
Neanderthals were not stupid
Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to new research Tuesday showing their stone tools were as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens. |
When I saw that headline, I wondered if it had some sort of potentially-humorous connection to the veggie/carbonfootprint story. I assumed ole Neander and Friends were meat consumers…and look what their carbon footprint got them.
Anyway, I went beyond the headline into the story itself and found this gem of a concluding paragraph:
| Other studies have claimed that Neanderthals may have died out because they struggled with changing conditions brought by increasingly cold temperatures, failing to adapt their hunting methods when species such as mammoth and bison fled south and a once-forested Europe changed into a sparsely vegetated landscape during the last Ice Age. |
So there you are. If they would have increased their meat consumption, they would have increased their carbon footprint. That would have resulted in more global warming which might have reversed those “increasingly cold temperatures.”
Maybe they weren’t so smart after all. 🙄
Oh well.
If it looks too good to be true … – 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics
| It turns out that amazing line of fireworks footprints marching from Tiananmen Square to the Bird’s Nest stadium during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics was computer-generated and inserted into television coverage to look like the real thing.
It was fake. It didn’t go down like that. Of course, this is a case of good news-bad news. I was in Tiananmen Square on Friday evening, reporting and writing a column on the tens of thousands of jubilant Chinese citizens who gravitated there to celebrate. Those people saw two tiny flarelike blasts pop in the sky, followed by a lot of nothing, and they were probably baffled by the widespread reports of the lit-up sky, exploding footprints and brilliant fireworks. And today, I’m thinking those people are relieved to learn they’re not losing their marbles. That’s the good news. |
…followed by bad.
Potential Leukemia Breakthrough
| Australian scientists said Monday they had mapped a blood cell structure which could hold the key to improved drug treatments for diseases such as leukaemia, asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.
[…] “We hope that this discovery will lead to targeted therapies, more specific to the malfunctioning cells seen in diseases such as leukaemia.” |
Lesbian, Atheist, Muslim to “Attempt” Christian Life
| A new television program being broadcast this month follows a group of 13 non-Christian volunteers, who, on camera, attempt to “live by the teachings of the Bible for three weeks.”
“Make Me a Christian,” broadcast in a three-part series, asks the participants to be mentored by four pastors from a variety of backgrounds – Anglican, Catholic, Evangelical, and Pentecostal – as they attempt to live like Christians, an effort that runs in stark contrast to many of the participants’ backgrounds. The 13 volunteers who will make the effort include a tattooed militant atheist biker, a man who converted from Christianity to Islam, a lesbian schoolteacher, a lap-dancing witch with a lust for expensive shoes, a middle-class yuppie couple that can’t find time to spend with their children and a party animal who claims he’s slept with over 150 women. Whether people can be made into Christians by a three-week crash course in discipleship, however, remains a matter of debate. […] The show’s website concludes with the teaser line, “All this is just the start of their three hard weeks. Can they embrace Christian ideals and learn to live in a different way or will their old lives prove just too strong to resist?” |
You cannot live the Christian life without Jesus.
There is no Christian life without Christ. Not in real life. And certainly not in for-TV life.
| As a Russian jet bombed fields around his village, Djimali Avago, a Georgian farmer, asked me: “Why won’t America and Nato help us? If they won’t help us now, why did we help them in Iraq?”
A similar sense of betrayal coursed through the conversations of many Georgians here yesterday as their troops retreated under shellfire and the Russian Army pressed forward to take full control of South Ossetia. |
Note to other countries: Who will go to war against Russia for you? 😯
| Dozens of Russian warplanes staged air raids in Georgia on Monday, officials said, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused the United States of trying to undermine Russia’s mounting military offensive.
[…] Russia and Georgia pursued their attacks as diplomatic tensions worsened. US President George W. Bush, Georgia’s biggest western ally, said he had told Russia’s influential prime minister that its bombing of Georgia was “unacceptable.” Putin responded by accusing the US of trying to disrupt the Russian military operation by transporting Georgian troops from Iraq into the “conflict zone.” “I regret that some of our partners are not helping us but in fact are trying to impede us,” Putin said directly referring to the US flights of Georgian troops. […] The UN refugee agency said up to 80 percent of Gori’s population of 50,000 have fled the city because of Russian attacks. […] Russia, which has already moved battleships to the Black Sea and said it has sunk a Georgian navy vessel, is preparing to deploy 9,000 troops to bolster its forces inside a second separatist Georgian region, Abkhazia, a military spokesman was quoted as saying by Interfax. It will send more than 350 armoured vehicles to add to what is officially a Russian peacekeeping force in the breakaway region, the spokesman said. |
“What is officially a Russian peacekeeping force” highlights a concept I’ve found difficult to grasp for years. Look at Russia’s track record through fairly recent history and who wouldn’t consider their “friendly” military presence anywhere without at least some trepidation?
PS to Putin: So some of your partners aren’t helping you? Well, what’s the US to do when it’s also partners with your adversary? Ah, the strange world of geopolitics. And of plain ole politics. 🙄
Well, may the good news from Australia result in new and effective cures for leukemia. Amen.
That’s where the United States ranks in the 2008 Global Peace Index. 😯
And this in a list of 140.
That means I live in a country that is less at peace than most.
And the folks in Bhutan (26), Vietnam (37), Libya (61), Cuba (62), China (67) and Rwanda (76) are better off in that department. 🙄
Something seems wrong with that picture.
It looks like Scandinavia is the place to be.
Last year’s #97?
Iran.
(The US ranked 96 in 2007.)
I say someone doesn’t know how to correctly define peace.
Lemme see if the folks at Dictionary.com know a good definition.
Hmmmm. Methinks I’ll save my observations on that subject for another post.