I agree – most of my family back two generations went to the US – by the numbers, I’m actually one of the tiny Irish offshoot of a large American family. They weren’t imagining they would be coming back much or ever unless they prospered on arrival. Are we too squeamish these days? Wasn’t too long ago that things were considered worth the price of human lives – are only wars worth it now? Where are the rocket ship test pilots, for instance.

Would you take a one way ticket to Mars as a colony pioneer?

“I have a hard time taking someone serious when they don’t even know how to express themselves without using ‘those’ words.”

Personally, I have a hard time taking someone serious (sic) when they can’t apply basic grammar rules. But that’s just my own elitism peeking out.

I swear (or “cuss,” if you’re from a certain region). Sometimes I swear a lot, generally when I am tired or stressed. (These sometimes coincide with me being angry, but not always. There may be a causal relationship there.) Sometimes I string words together into swears that are so long and elaborate that by the time I’m done saying them I’m suppressing a giggle and feeling a little better.

I like seeing and hearing creative uses of words, and enjoy artfully crafted epithets. Some words have really bad connotations, though, and as a personal choice I avoid the ones that have particularly racist or misogynistic colo(u)rs. I don’t really appreciate it when someone uses some of those words in hateful ways, but in those cases it’s not the words themselves that bother me, it’s the hate that inspires them.

Many people use the argument that swearing is a replacement for good vocabulary, and will assume that people who swear do so because they have no other words. I think these people base their argument on the false assumption that a swear automatically falls to the bottom of one’s choice list. I’ve been accused of many things, but having a small vocabulary is not one of them. Yet I swear. When I do, it’s not because I don’t have other words for the situation, it’s just that I’ve decided to choose those words. I like them. I like they way they sound. I like wrapping them into a verbal package that expresses the required sentiment. And sometimes it has the desired effect on the listener.

Overuse of any word, be it clean, profane, or blasphemous, does get irksome. I think that’s what some people are thinking about when they use that argument. When the word communicates nothing, when it’s not creative or artful, when it’s repetitive without rhetorical purpose, it gets old quickly. Sort of like reading an essay where the writer can’t get over the use of “very.” Even when the word is a swear, in my mind it’s not a profanity issue but a word issue.

Now if the prudes out there could just get whatever it is stuck up their behinds out and stop turning off their brains every time they hear the word “fuck,” we could get on with talking about substance instead of words…

Heinberg says:

According to one recent U.S. government-sponsored study, if the peak does occur soon replacements are unlikely to appear quickly enough and in sufficient quantity to avert what it calls “unprecedented” social, political, and economic impacts.

And I know without looking its the Hirsch report. ‘zah. Happily, I can turn my crazy to gain because I’ve got to do a strategic review of Cairn Energy and so a fairly detailed tear-down of the whole energy industry is legitimately in order. Not a calorie wasted, ‘zah.

I sincerely hope they’re all very wrong, its just a pity that the best ‘business as usual’ cases, where our only problems are climate change (as opposed to an imploding infrastructure on top of all that) are all based on the USGS 2000 survey which… is a great example of straight line forecasting. Energy Watch Group does a pretty good shred of the USGS report (see Annex 2) – its entertaining to see bullshit science get torn apart if nothing else.

I suppose its flattering how the optimistic views assume all of us Big Oil folks are magicians capable of conjuring thousands of kilometers of steel, dozens of burly workers and the mystic insight to find plays at a rate that will meet *soaring* demand. Maybe tomorrow I’ll trying flying to work. That should be well within my sorcerous powers…

Although I have little time to blog, this was brought to my attention. At first I thought it was a joke. Maybe it was meant to be a joke, but there seem to be a lot of people taking it seriously, bravely solving the world’s problems by sitting at their computers. (I do understand that I should not be throwing stones, as my glass house was built on the idea that sitting in front of a computer and thinking about things is the way to save the world. Do as I say, not as I do, kids.) So I will add my voice to the shrieking hordes.

We’re supposed to be blogging about the environment. Al Gore got the Nobel Prize for (essentially) blogging about the environment, and rightly so because awareness is key to solving this particular problem. The more guilt you have over your carbon footprint, the more likely you are to do something about it. (This has spawned a decision-making tool popular in my immediate social circle: “What would Al Gore do?” Of course, Al Gore would use the hand towels instead of a paper towel, but I believe in my heart he would also put the f*cking toilet seat down when he was done. But I digress.)

Yes, you should be thinking about the environment — not just your carbon footprint, but how you’re contributing to the looming potable water problem and junking up the planet with your plastic wrappers. Your plane flights might be bad for Mother Earth, but before you fret about that consider what you’re doing every day that isn’t strictly necessary and also creates problems.

These are large-ish problems with complicated solutions, but I will only offer a small one. Stop blogging, turn off your damn computer (that includes the CPU, monitor, router, and DSL modem, all of which draw power even when you’re not using them), and go outside. Remember to turn off the lights when you go. If it’s raining or dark outside, go somewhere else where the lights are already on. Walk there. (Or cycle, though cycling in the rain is really a small step up from hell and I don’t recommend it.) If you’re hungry, try to get something local and/or organic. If you’re thirsty, again try for something local. Fewer dead dinosaurs were burned to get that local stuff to you.

If that’s all a bit much, just turn off the computer. And consider how much carbon would be saved if all those bloggers did the same.

About the only thing people on both sides of the immigration issue can agree on is that the citizenship test (the knowledge-based requirement of getting citizenship) needed some work.

The new American citizenship test for naturalisation hopefuls has been approved and will be put into use next year. Always on the ball, the New York Times talks about it. The test includes Constitutional law, American history, and modern politics. This is, apparently, something that “genuinely talks about what makes an American citizen.” I’m forced to wonder whether every genuine American citizen can name the Speaker of the House, or any of the writers of the Federalist Papers. (Happily, “Publius” is an accepted answer to that last one. And “War Between the States” is an accepted answer for “Name the US war between the North and the South.”)

I don’t have a problem with newcomers being required to know these things. I just wish all voting Americans had such comprehensive knowledge of government and history. (This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean I believe there should be a test requirement for voting — that’s another discussion entirely.)

Not everyone is happy, of course. John Fonte, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, said he “would like to see an even more vigorous emphasis on Americanization.”

I assume by “Americanization” he means understanding British philosophies on free markets and freedom of speech in a primarily German Protestant ethical framework. He probably means knowing about (if not liking) the nation’s iconic foods, like pizza (Italian/Greek), hamburgers (German), and fries (probably Belgian). He almost certainly means not taking part in the war on Christmas, and embracing German traditions like putting up a Christmas tree every winter.

He might mean sharing citizenship with people who claim to be Irish, Polish, German, and Italian (often all the same person) yet probably couldn’t point out Warsaw on a map.

Far, far away from here there are other countries struggling with immigration issues as well. I’m confident they will work things out faster and better than Americans have. Looking at America’s 400+ year history with immigration, its complete and utter failure to acknowledge the integral role immigrants have had in shaping modern American culture even after 200 years of invasion makes me wonder whether “native” people are capable of allowing the integration they say they expect.

Mr. Lomborg works with the Copenhagen Consensus which has the premise “that we can’t solve every problem in the world, and asks: Which ones should we fix first?”.

What I found most interesting about this talk is the point that effort spent on climate change will have the effect of preventing bad outcomes decades or more from now. By then, it is reasonably certain that the people who will be worst affected will be wealthy on a par with EU citizens now – and could reasonably ask “why was all this money spent to help me, when I am capable of looking after myself, while my grandfather was ignored when even a fraction of the same money could have made a huge difference to his life”.

This returns to a theme I saw – in the Economist? – where we will have to choose between a locked down, climate friendly low growth global-ish economy or a carbon-emitting one that generates enough surpluses to fund lots of poverty reduction and humanitarian programs. It probably won’t be *our* standard of living that sucks up the squeeze in the end but the people we help (to a greater or lesser extent) today.

I need to look into this and find some numbers. Theres lots of information out there, I’ve a feeling some of it is sitting in a folder on my shelf right now, I should be able to find some sort of corroboration – but it rings true to me. I’d factored in all of Mr. Lomborgs thoughts before – that we can have one or the other, not both, but I had not thought about the fact that by the time climate change really starts to bite some of these ‘poor’ countries will be quite wealthy in absolute terms, even if not relatively.

I know abortion is a bit of a taboo topic in some places, so I’ll hide this behind a cut (I really have been reading too much LJ, haven’t I?). I was inspired by a recent New York Times article that chronicles some of the events following a Supreme Court opinion handed down a little while ago. One justice, in his explanation, went beyond the facts and law of the case to opine:

“While we find no reliable data to measure the phenomenon, it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained… Severe depression and loss of esteem can follow.”

Thank goodness.

Finally, someone has come along and put his chivalrous foot down. A man who I’ve never met knows what’s in my best interest, and is determined to make choices for me so I don’t have to. Clearly it’s difficult for me, as a hormone-saturated woman, to rationally and objectively evaluate a grave situation and make a decision. I need a judge to do that for me, so much the better that he does it with “no reliable data.” It’s good to know that if I ever end up pregnant, the state is there to ensure I will stay that way for the requisite nine months (though it won’t provide any sort of care for me or the separate, sacred fetus). No decisions necessary from me, no siree.

It’s a great start. What we need now is to push this philosophy farther. There are so many other choices I might be faced with in my life that might result in “severe depression or loss of esteem.” I hope they get right on legislating against doing a postgrad — that’s got a documented tendency to depress people:

Perhaps such figures help explain the recent finding that “depression and other forms of mental distress” were a serious problem in a study of more than 3,100 graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley. According to the study: “Nearly half of all survey respondents (45 percent) reported an emotional or stress-related problem that significantly impacted their academic performance or well-being.” Another 67 percent reported feeling hopeless at times, 95 percent felt overwhelmed in graduate school, and 54 percent said they had felt so “depressed that it was difficult to function.” About 10 percent had seriously considered suicide, and one in 200 had actually attempted suicide in the last year.

So many people stand to benefit from this philosophy of legislation. After all, the women potentially saved from depression every year by this benevolent opinion only make up a measly 0.45% of the US population! What about all the women who have children? Those who aren’t pregnant? And think of all the men who could be saved from loss of esteem! We could skip right past the messy decision-making and let our lawmakers and judges tell us what we can and can’t do, saving us all kinds of regret and reflection later on.

Heaven forbid we all, men and women, be treated like sovereign human beings bestowed with the same higher brain functions as Justice Kennedy.

There are six main parties running, and a whole handful of independents. I’m not going to say anything about who to vote for, but I might borrow the voices of my fellow covenators to exhort you to get out there and exercise that franchise!

I dug out a bunch of papers, did some research, you can imagine a cut scene montage of me scouring through journals for ethics articles which actually question the root ethicism of the profession of the people to whom these journals were being targeted, printing, stapling, reading, chucking over my should, drinking overpriced branded coffee, reading blogs, printing, punching, using treasury tags, reading art books on rock posters, printing, reading and eventually arriving back here.

The general gist of my findings are this – to quote O’Shaughnessy, J. and O’Shaughnessy, N. J. (2002) “Whatever influence marketing has had on the creation of a consumerism tied to the narrowest form of hedonism, it has been in the role more of a facilitator than of manufacturer. If someone were to insist that we name a single culprit, it would be the development of a strong value orientation that puts unrestrained freedom at the forefront.” A later response to the O’Shaughnessy’s by Andrew V. Abela (2006) takes issue with their points but doesn’t provide anything concrete. Abela notes “the existence of a causal relationship [between the development of consumerism and the rise of modern marketing] and its likely direction remain unclear”.

Marketing and consumerism took off at the same time. Which came first?

Ref:

O’Shaughnessy, J. and O’Shaughnessy, N.J. (2002) “Marketing, the consumer society and hedonism”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.36 Nos 5/6, pp.524-47

Abela, A.V. (2006) “Marketing and consumerism a response to O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.40 Nos 1/2, pp.5-16