So says both AAA and Allstate. High fuel costs are the suspected reason. “Maybe I can make it to the next paycheck before I have to fill up again.”

1 Comment »

From the YouTube notes:

John Gossop, farmer and author of Famine in the West, explains why food prices are rising and why there will soon be food shortages even in developed countries. Peak Food, oil and gas shortages, climate change, increasing world population with millions in Asia eating more meat so needing more land per person when there is less, water shortages, competition from ethanol and biomass, falling fish stocks and crop land losses are all threats to food security.

This is, to say the least, deeply gloomy. May we find solutions so such a dystopian future is not our fate. And I assume we will. Humankind is nothing if not enormously resilient and inventive. The Black Death killed enormous numbers of people yet the Renaissance followed it.

Gloomy predictions don’t really work for getting people mobilized. They need a vision, something positive, to get them involved. That’s what activists need to provide.

No Comments »

I just upgraded one of our other blogs, Downtown Tomatoes, from Movable Type 3.2 to 4.12. Attempted to add the Minimalist Green style, but now, as you can see, the templates appear to have no CSS attached to them.

Any MT users out there who can help me fix the site?

It appears the easiest way is to upgrade to mt4 template, but I’m not quite sure how to do this. My mt3 templates are custom.

No Comments »

The venerable War Resisters League was formed in 1923. They are a radical, pacifist antiwar group. They’ve just released a thoughtful report on the state of the antiwar movement after a “Listening Process” of interviewing 90 organizers across the country.

The primary question they want to answer is, why is the antiwar movement currently so anemic and apparently powerless, especially considering that most of the populace opposes the war?

They conclude, as I have, that the antiwar movement too often marginalizes itself, either through believing it is still a voice crying in the wilderness or through trying to out-Left each other and thus alienating the middle they claim to want to attract.

Many of today’s antiwar activists were opposing war when it was very unpopular to do so, and this courage to take an unpopular stand—especially in the time immediately following 9/11—is admirable. The problem is when we become so accustomed to being ostracized or marginalized for our politics that standing against the majority becomes a merit in itself, hard-wired into our circuitry. We cling to an identity of the righteous few who cry out in the desert, with no one listening. We stop looking for common ground and for openings and become resigned to a world in which our hopes will never be realized.

The country is moving to the Left. Sharply. The antiwar movement needs to move towards this and most importantly, listen to what people in the center are saying. Because you can’t have a mass movement until people in the political center are part of it. This also means many Left groups will need to resolve their conflicting motives. Are they organizing to end the war or using the antiwar movement primarily as a way to recruit for their group? The latter approach is self-defeating because the center will never want to be part of a hard Left group, and by only appealing to the hard Left, such groups limit their reach and influence.

The election of Obama, whether he’s liberal or not, presents a opportunity to the Left as expectations for change will be huge. We need to be more optimistic and to genuinely reach to the center and listen to what they are saying.

7 Comments »

What’s more, they’re using wind to power the central control systems of the rigs. Solve Climate has the details.

A few years from now wind and solar power will probably be so common that installations like this won’t even be newsworthy.

No Comments »