Summertime

No, I do not always sit at home hatching plans to invert the environmental paradigm of America. Sometimes I go out and drink and laugh about the old times.
Actual dialogue:

"You couldn't run and you lay down a bunt?
"Bowden, that was 21 years ago!"
"Two outs and two strikes?"
"I saw the third baseman playing back."
"I don't care. I almost tackled you at first base when he threw you out."
"He got me by half an inch."
"You were flat on your face."
"I dove head first!"
"You tripped over your gimpy leg."
"Oh, what the fuck! Forgive me."
"Never."
"I was in that car crash with that drunk on the way to school."
"I don't care."
"I thought I could beat it out."
"Inexcusable."

And we played cornhole, a game where you throw a beanbag onto a platform until 3 am.
That's JJ and Bowden in the back. Bowden said I look like Nakoma from the Grizzly Adams tv series. You can judge for yourself.


Maybe when I was 23 years old I sort of looked like this. I haven't had a chin that smooth since 1982. I am 1/32 Native American on my mother's side so...I'm going to get one of those necklaces one of these days to hide my bulging Adam's apple.

Here's Nakoma on his horse...

Speaking of Grizzly Adams, it was one of those tv shows I loves to watch in 1978. I loved it. I identified with it. Was it propaganda for the environment? I don't think so and the creator would agree...

"The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams was mostly the result of market testing and computer modeling, a research process Sunn Classic Pictures founder Charles E. Sellier Jr. was quite proud of. Grizzly wore no animal skins and ate no meat because the audience displayed heavy PETA-type leanings. The audience, he went on to say, likes "eternal summer in the primeval, womanless wilderness."

This explains quite a bit about my life...Little did I know it was all mapped out by tv executives.

The story was based off a real person and was cheap to produce so NBC went with it. But it made sense to me. I understood the simplicity of the woods and Indian blood brothers and bears and log cabins.

"I want to live like that," I'd say to my father.
"Ok. Whatever," was his response.

Well, I was determined and a careful study of movies like Jeremiah Johnson and Grizzly Adams and reading Call of the Wild at least twice I landed in a forest in Alaska where I chopped down trees to make a log cabin and snared rabbits for food. Thank you NBC and Nakoma!

Lyrics to theme song..

Deep inside the forest there's a door into another land.
Here is our life and home.
We are staying here forever in the beauty of this place all alone.
We keep on hoping.
Maybe there's a world where we don't have to run.
Maybe there's a time we'll call our own, living free in harmony and majesty.
Take me home. Take me home.

I took these lyrics as gospel even though they are obviously conflicted. Are you home in the forest or trying to get home through the forest? You need to go to the forest to find a door? Why? Why do you have to be all alone? And if you are all alone then why hope there's a world where you don't have to run? What are you running from? Who is following you to the forest? It makes no sense. If you've gone to the middle of the uninhabited forest that is beautiful but you are still hoping there's a time you'll call your own and be able to live free in harmony and majesty then maybe you are fucked in the head because you've done all you can do. What's next? climbing in a volcano? Are you whining because you have a bear as a friend and an Indian as a blood brother and a crazy gold miner as a buddy? Two human contacts and a bear? IS that too much to handle? You want sympathy?


PS: In other news I have ended my assignment at the hockey warehouse and am getting my hack's license.

Are You a Friend of the People?

Recent discussions in the comment section have led me to this image. It's more proof that people want to be part of something noble, something that transcends business. Business makes things last, but ethics are what many people can respond to. We're not all businessmen so images like this are how many people account for their energy. It's like a dollar symbol to many of us.

I'm looking for images that will tug at the heart of the inner environmentalist in us all. Let the businessmen worry about the numbers. If the demand is there then it will pay for itself. But the demand can be manipulated and mostly it has been manipulated by Sams Club and Shell Oil. That doesn't mean those business models work, but it means they have the best marketing strategy. Whole grain bread, marijuana, goat farms and radish juice are absolutely no different fundamentally than Doritos, root beer, cigarettes and industrial slaughterhouses, but the difference is in the marketing, the propaganda. They each can be equally economical if businessmen break it down. But the demand comes first. And demand is controlled by marketing. So, we need to manufacture a demand for alternative energy.

Films like Inconvenient Truth, March Of the Penguin, Crude, Arctic Tale, WALL-E, even Avatar are propaganda for alternative energy but the mainstream media is controlled by so few people who are owned by business entities and except for PBS it's all ad sponsored or influenced by the chamber of commerce so it takes media like Al Gore's Current TV to try to start over with a different paradigm. There's a bloody war of words taking place right now and I want volunteers for the front lines.
Beat your swords into plowshares and your iPhones into flower pots!

Op Ed

I just read an op ed piece that really slammed Obama for linking the oil spill to our dependence on oil.
It seems that people are taking offense to being told to change our energy habits. But the strategy is interesting because it is so childish. They contend that talking about the future when oil is still spilling is ignoring the present crisis. And also to "exploit the crisis" to address energy habits is bad. This is an impregnable defense mechanism and proof that oil propaganda has been doing their job. D.C. think tanks funded by Shell and Exxon pay smart people to create these arguments and they earned their money. Propaganda is the strongest force in America right now. I'll bet a think tank kid wrote that original op ed piece. It reads like a speechwriter's hand is behind it.

Anyway, it's an impossible task to change the mind of someone with cyclical thinking (I should know) but I'm never one to back down from a challenge. I doubt the blogger will post my comment so here it is. What do you think? I didn't see Obama's speech or read the whole op ed piece but did I really need to?


"300 million people can't all plug the hole in the well so I think it's a fair answer to the question of "What can we do?"

We can't afford not to have renewable energy. Coal and nuclear and oil only make economic sense when environmental costs are kept off the books. Anyone who tells you different probably worked for Enron.

The strategy of expecting 300 million people to all concentrate on plugging a hole in a broken oil well is not valid but it's a very good smoke screen. Like someone living in Kansas should just sit in their house and worry about the marsh of Louisiana?? Or Obama is living in denial by looking to the future when the oil well is capped and everyone goes back to driving 40 miles to save $10 on their grocery bill? Please think about the big picture.

The shock doctrine works both ways: when people are most disoriented and fearful is when propaganda has an opportunity to be assimilated. In this case, instead of linking Iraq to terrorism, the oil well is being linked to our oil addiction. Is that such a stretch?

There's been a 100 year long energy propaganda war in America and maybe the tide is turning. Don't believe me or Obama but do some independent research and do it fast."

Another Wise Quote to Ignore...

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

What does he know? Arrogant cocksucker.

Solar Poster Contest

I want to get some submissions for a propaganda contest on Solar. Getting third graders to make posters is a good idea because it normalizes behavior. Like ,the way to prevent Graffiti is to get third graders to paint murals all over the city and when they get tagged the kids will feel violated. So, in addition to solar related projects in schools we're going to need some propaganda that targets adults. This one is excellent.

So, something like kids in Texas turning on a spigot and no water is coming out. A look of fear and disappointment in the kid's eyes. A coal burning power plant in the backgroung.
Buy Solar!

The implication being if we rely on fossil fuels then the power plants must be cooled or use steam turbines and that is depleting the water tables. But the public can find that out later. For now, they need to equate the lack of solar with the lack of water. I feel that's what gets a response. It is a war against carbon. this is not a lifestyle choice that's simply "ethical". Fossil fuels have gotten us where we are but it's time to kick the addiction. How about that? "Kick the addiction." With a giant smokestack instead of a cigarette. Work on it. I want results by next week.

Here's a Soviet one that I love. It's about nuclear power but use it as a model for solar.

I think there are two things to include:

1. The Sun
2. A Poster Child

The propagandists at Ford and Shell have been working hard for 100 years to spread their misinformation so we've got to move fast on this.
Winner will be judged by the public.