Gas-saving tips

With high pump prices, folks are trading ways to conserve gasoline.  Here are a few to get you started:

·        If the engine has recently been running, you don’t need to put your foot on the gas to start it again—you can just turn the key.
·        Avoid drive-throughs.  Park the car and go inside.
·        If you do use the drive-through (or idle anywhere for more than 1 minute), turn off your car.
·        Don’t drive aggressively.  Jackrabbit starts and sudden stops gobble fuel. 

What are you doing to save gas?

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Discuss: Gas-saving tips

May 13, 2008

The “Greening of Hate”

The “greening of hate” is the attempt to blame immigrants for environmental degradation, according to activists like Betsy Hartman and groups like Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment and American Friends Service Committee. 

According to organizations like Negative Population Growth, the Carrying Capacity Network, and Population-Environment Balance, the phrase unfairly labels honest debate regarding immigration, and attempts to stifle it.

These groups say that the need to stop immigration stems from a desire to prevent environmental abuses.  Those who oppose them suggest that overuse of resources by people with higher living standards poses the greater threat, and that immigration is being used as a wedge issue to separate environmentalists and people of color or in poverty.     

This idea gained traction in the 1990s during the Sierra Club’s two fierce internal battles over whether that environmental organization should take a stance against immigration.  The organization eventually decided it would “take no position on immigration levels or on policies governing immigration into the United States. The Club remains committed to environmental rights and protections for all within our borders, without discrimination based on immigration status.”

Since neither immigration nor environmental degradation are going away any time soon, it’s likely that we’ll see additional efforts to meld these two issues.  So, what’s your take on the “greening of hate”?       

 

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Discuss: The “Greening of Hate”

May 6, 2008

Is cool dead?

Generations come and go, but cool remains.  Unlike terms like "the cat’s pajamas” and “groovy,” “cool” is still…well, cool. 

Or it has been.  High-schooler Ben Lass won a writing contest for Canadian youth with his essay “The Cost of Cool.”  Lass says that cool is dead—killed by consumerism.  He suggests that advertisers cynically deconstructed the elements of cool and then exploited them—minus the rebellion—to make a buck.

“Cool was the one thing that the underprivileged had that the rich couldn't own. Today the poor can't even get into the stores where Cool is sold. Cool is no longer anti-establishment, it is the establishment.”

Lass laments cool, which he suggests originated in response to racial oppression.  “Cool was something that anybody could earn. It was the look in your eye, the swagger in your step, the way you held yourself so that when a banker walked by wearing a suit worth more than your whole family, that banker wished he was wearing your leather jacket.”

What do you think?  Do you agree with Ben Lass that cool has been killed off by consumerism that now masquerades as what’s cool?

 

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Discuss: Is cool dead?

April 29, 2008

Your political location

Where do you find yourself on the political map? 

Not content with the traditional left/right continuum, a political journalist assisted by a professor of social history created what they call The Political Compass.  Through a series of 61 questions, the Compass considers both your economic and social viewpoint, and then reveals your position in a new way.  The originators prefer that you not know too much about the test before taking it, however.  Their website states “We feel that knowing too much about the way the final results are presented will influence the way you respond, and prevent you from getting an accurate reading.”

They also tell visitors that “There's no right, wrong or ideal response. It's simply a measure of attitudes and inevitable human contradictions to provide a more integrated definition of where people and parties are really at.”

Responses are not tracked or recorded, and your participation is entirely anonymous.  See where you land politically by clicking here to take the test.

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Discuss: Your political location

April 22, 2008

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