What do “Lord of the Rings” and the Beijing Olympics have in common? After several excrutiating and turbulent weeks, the Olympic torch has finally made it to Hong Kong. As it has all along its torturous trail, the torch brought with it the same ugliness engineered by the Chinese government and its minions that led to violence and deprivation of freedoms in England, France, San Francisco and elsewhere around the globe.
When it’s all over, the Chinese government and its Legions of Dumb might be similarly driven to cast the cursed flame-in-a-box into the infernal depths of Hell. Or better yet, jump in with it.
I know some of you have seen this already in an earlier post. But I’m trying out my new Wordpress 2.5.1 blog software and wanted to see how this works. I’ve gotten lots of great comments on YouTube about the fascinating and creative energy system used in Iceland where I visited just a little less than a year ago. You’ll feel warmer just clicking on it.
OK, it’s not exactly Madonna’s latest. But it’s something I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past few months. A great PR agent named Luanne Valentin found my website and contacted me a while ago to ask if I would do a video to kick off the Salt Lake Sustainable Building Conference which started this morning and goes through Wednesday. I said yes in exchange for sponsorship trade and the chance to schmooze the crowd and do the things sponsors are allowed to do when they spend a lot of money. And because I believe in the cause and this is exactly the type of thing I want to be doing with my life- besides, of course, making money.
It’s been a rather stormy and wintry spring so I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to shoot the video I needed (watch it and you’ll understand why). I even got a chance to use some stuff that I’ve shot over the years because I liked it and it was appropriate. But, quite frankly, it was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever worked on and for a good cause too. So I hope you enjoy half as much as I did! BTW: the crowd was the biggest in the conference’s history and a huge success.
Here we go: $120/barrel oil. It ain’t going to get better, folks. If you thought having a couple of oil men in the White House would keep oil prices down- wrong again. Oil companies don’t care about you or the price you pay because they don’t have to. We’re slaves locked in chains we put on ourselves. Unless we choose to free ourselves from our own chains, we cannot complain about what the oil companies, Saudi Arabia, OPEC and our complicit leaders in the Bush Regime are doing to us.
Filed under: Solar, renewable — Ken Schreiner @ 10:13 am
The sure antidote for renewaphobia is knowing what you’re getting into. It took me a lot of time and a lot of reading and talking to experts, vendors and customers to figure out how I was going to handle the construction of Solarius Precarious. Posted here is an interview with an expert to help alleviate your fear of the future and make that first, big step toward really securing your and our future.
Filed under: Earth, dualism — Ken Schreiner @ 10:56 am
There’s something oddly comforting in knowing that the imminent threat to your life and everything you own is totally unpreventable unless you move far away very quickly. But there isn’t exactly a panic in Reno, Nevada where seismologists are now telling residents to get ready for the big one after a series of significant and ever-strengthening tremors.
Like Vesuvius and Pompeii, Renoids (is that what residents of Reno are called?) are going about their daily business even as the threat of massive destruction grows without indication of when it will come. Now that’s a town with its existential act together. Or maybe it’s just that after decades of legalized gambling, Renoids think the odds are in their favor. That’s quite a gamble. But residents of Reno: Schreiner’s Media Landscape salutes you. As Camus would say about the existential philosophy toward earthquakes, “A healthy attitude also includes faults.”
Sounds almost like an Onion headline. Anyway, another tremor hits the Sierra Nevada. It’s strange. I feel happier and more enlightened after reading about how my house with me inside it could be swallowed up by Earth at any time than by reading about the presidential campaign, Iraq, Bush and all the other tragedy that constitutes the daily American information diet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I came from the Earth, I will go back to the Earth and it’s all just a matter of time- and style.
With the ultimate ascent of HDTV well underway, more old TV sets- are being discarded- incorrectly. Our natural inclination is to simply throw them away. But they do have value for parts and even for continued use. A set that I literally wore out in Boston in 2005 was snapped up hours after I put it out on the curb. In this Washington Post article, the potential waste of valuable electronics is addressed by a new and urgent effort to establish TV recycling campaigns. And it’s something everyone should know about before they just take their old set to the dump.
Which begs the question: where are our TV networks, socially-conscious mega-media corporations and local TV stations in the race to prevent a potential environmental assault? Right where they normally are- watching from the bleachers. Nice going, folks. Create the problem then let someone else clean it up. What else is new?
The excellent documentary program “Nova” on PBS re-broadcast “Saved By the Sun” on KBYU the other night. It’s an outstanding, non-elitist and entertaining look at how solar energy is growing all over the world, even the United States. It spares the heavy hand but shows conclusively how the rest of the world is making the inevitable transition to renewable energy while America and the Bush Regime crawl with glacial speed out of the 19th century into a future where power is distributed, wealthy oil and fossil fuel tycoons are crying over their putters on the 17th at Pebble Beach, and we are no longer enslaved by our Saudi Arabian and OPEC masters.
My conclusion after watching: where did America fall so woefully behind in innovation, forward-thinking and world leadership? It happened a long time before the current Bush- with Daddy and a guy named Reagan. The documentary points out again how Reagan took out the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed at the White House and renewable energy’s rise in the 1970s during the first oil crisis essentially stopped. It’s taken this long for America to recover but the efforts to thwart challenges to the primacy of centralized, fossil fuel-based energy systems are accelerating. It’s sad that incompetent presidents can have so much impact on daily life in America. But there you go.
I’m still not voting for any of the current candidates. The reason is they really can’t change things for the better in the face of military preeminence, corporate dominance and media complicity. The only thing a president can do is screw things up even more. Bring back Calvin Coolidge.
What do “Lord of the Rings” and the Beijing Olympics have in common? After several excrutiating and turbulent weeks, the Olympic torch has finally made it to Hong Kong. As it has all along its torturous trail, the torch brought with it the same ugliness engineered by the Chinese government and its minions that led to violence and deprivation of freedoms in England, France, San Francisco and elsewhere around the globe.
