Apr

20

New Read

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I read the Political Animal daily and through that I have become acquainted with Hilzoy, who posts at Political Animal frequently. But I had not read her own blog, Obsidian Wings. I highly recommend it if you follow current events at all.

Jan

28

When Old is New

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If I told you that railroads could provide a cost-efficient and environmentally friendly alternative to using long distance trucking and air shipping to move much of our mail and freight, you might be skeptical. But in Phillip Longman’s new piece in Washington Monthly he makes an extremely credible and timely argument for this very idea.

In a study recently presented to the National Academy of Engineering, the Millennium Institute, a nonprofit known for its expertise in energy and environmental modeling, calculated the likely benefits of an expenditure of $250 billion to $500 billion on improved rail infrastructure. It found that such an investment would get 83 percent of all long-haul trucks off the nation’s highways by 2030, while also delivering ample capacity for high-speed passenger rail. If high-traffic rail lines were also electrified and powered in part by renewable energy sources, that investment would reduce the nation’s carbon emission by 39 percent and oil consumption by 15 percent. By moderating the growing cost of logistics, it would also leave the nation’s economy 10 percent larger by 2030 than it would otherwise be.*

I highly recommend the piece. It’s intriguing to consider that an industry that radically transformed the country once over a hundred years ago could again become a cutting edge technology in reworking our relationship to finite fuel sources.

Jan

21

Inspirational

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Obama

I came across this image of a quilt by Lucky Shie at Lesley Riley’s blog. I continue to be slightly amazed at the impact Barack Obama is having on people. In psychological terms, it is sometimes referred to as a shift. I’m starting to think something in our national consciousness has indeed shifted. And it is about time.

Jan

7

Please, Get Over Yourself

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In a trend that is becoming far too common, best-selling author Neale Walsch was found to have published an essay that was actually written by Candy Chand ten years ago. The article involves a story about a child in a Christmas pageant who held a letter upside down. The children had letters meant to spell out “Christmas Love”, but the “m” was inverted and “Christ was Love” was spelled out instead.

Walsch has apologized and acknowledge he made a “serious error.” He acknowledged he has been retelling the story as his own for years.

“Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized … and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”

Chand is unconvinced.

Ms. Chand said in a telephone interview that she did not believe Mr. Walsch’s explanation. “If he knew this was wrong, he should have known it was wrong before he got caught,” she said. “Quite frankly, I’m not buying it.”

Fair enough, Walsch plagiarized the story, cops to it and Chand rejects his apology. But she just won’t let it go.

“I have strong issue with anyone who would appear to plagiarize my work and pretend it is his own,” she said. “That takes away from the truth of the material, it takes away from the miracle that occurred, because people begin to question what they can believe anymore.

Here is where Chand starts to lose me. I understand her outrage at being plagiarized. But what is this business about the truth of the material being undermined? And a miracle happened? Oh, and Neale Walsch passing off this story as his own makes it hard for people to believe?

For the record, I congregate with the unwashed heathens as a rule. So an inverted “m” that changes the meaning of a cute holiday message does not rise to the level of feeding the masses with two loaves of bread and a basket of fish, in my mind. But others see it differently—I understand. Had the child inverted the “m” and then it suddenly transfigured into an “i” and the “a” next to it disappeared in front of the assembly, I would concede that a miracle of some sort had occurred. Short of that, what you have is a cute Christmas story.

But wait there’s more.

“As a professional writer, when someone appears to plagiarize, they damage the industry, they damage other writers’ credibility and they hurt the reader because they never know what to believe anymore.”

Now we are back to Walsch making it impossible to believe again. She never says what we can’t believe in now, but I have an idea. She continues on about his damaging her credibility by recounting the story publicly. But she isn’t quite finished.

Speaking of Mr. Walsch, she asked: “Has the man who writes best-selling books about his ‘Conversations With God’ also heard God’s commandments? ‘Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property’?”

This is where she completely crosses over into self-righteous sanctimony. Candy, please get over yourself. That guy whose name appeared in the Christmas play your were at also said something about turning the other cheek. You might want to look it up.