Smart Energy

There’s been a lot of buzz in the science blogosphere recently about the Research Works Act, a piece of legislation that’s been introduced in the U.S. that may have big impacts on open access publishing of scientific results. John Dupuis has an excellent round-up of posts on the subject and Kevin Zeinio has a great rant on the topic of keeping scientific knowledge open and accessible, too. What follows is an analysis by Janet D. Stewwedel from the Scientific American blog. Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a fast, easy, free, and non-violent way to drive the big banks out of their greedy little minds is sitting in your mailbox right now. And it will help support the postal system, too! Hey, it’s win-win.

Bill O’Reilly does’t want to Monday morning quarterback, but even even Megyn Kelly says that Lt John Pike didn’t exactly look “surrounded and threatened” before he started dousing protesters in pepper spray. She did, however, call pepper spray “a derivative of actual pepper … a food product, essentially.” Or as they put it at Grist, ” after all the cop just lightly seasoned these students with a delicious food mist.”

Or as one wag of a commenter at Gawker noted,

• Megyn Kelly on fire hoses: “It’s a sports beverage, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on police dogs: “It’s a family pet, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on tasers: “It’s static cling, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on rubber bullets: “It’s a pencil eraser, essentially!”
• Megyn Kelly on hand grenades: “It’s a Fourth of July firework, essentially! God bless America.”

via In The Alternate American Universe, Pepper Spray Joins Pizza as a Vegetable : TreeHugger.

The Photo That Will Start A Real Revolution didn’t take long to turn into a meme, nor did it take long for the outrage at the event to spread around the world. But perhaps the best article I [Lloyd Alter on Treehugger] have read is Alexis Madrigal’s Why I Feel Bad for the Pepper-Spraying Policeman, Lt. John Pike. Madrigal notes that Pike is representative of changes in policing since 1999′s battle of Seattle, a militarizing of policing (these were not even municipal police, but campus cops!). This new brutal form of policing coincides with the change in coverage of these events, as video cameras in phones become omnipresent. Ten years ago the cops might have pepper-sprayed kids and said they felt threatened and might get away with it. A hundred videos make that impossible today.

via Outrage Spreads After UC Davis Pepper Spraying : TreeHugger.

At the University of California at Davis yesterday afternoon, police tore down down the tents of students inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and arrested those who stood in their way. Others peacefully demanded that police release the arrested.

UC Davis Police Lt. John Pike walks down a line of people seated quietly on the ground in an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, and spray them all with pepper spray at very close range. He is clearing a path for fellow officers to walk through and arrest more students, but it’s as if he’s dousing a row of bugs with insecticide.

via Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis – Boing Boing.

File under “the personal is political, food is religion… and big money”:

Politico reports that House and Senate negotiators are likely to approve agriculture appropriations language that would allow the tomato paste on pizza to be counted as a vegetable serving under the USDA’s new school meal guidelines. Count this as the result of lobbying efforts by processed food giants ConAgra and Schwan Food. Schwan is one of the world’s largest purveyors of frozen pizza and pitching for its sauce is Sen. Amy Knobluchar, Democrat of Minnesota, where Schwan is based.

The new pizza rule comes quick on the heels of a Senate amendment prohibiting the USDA from limiting the quantity of potatoes served in school meals. That was pushed by senators from potato producing states Maine and Colorado.

via Processed Food Industry Shows USDA Who’s Boss in the Cafeteria | Lunchbox.

1,252 people were arrested at a climate protest in front of the White House.

The largest environmental civil disobedience in decades concluded at the White House this morning with organizers pledging to escalate a nationwide campaign to push President Obama to deny the permit for a new tar sands oil pipeline.

“Given yesterday’s baffling cave on ozone standards, the need for a fighting environmental movement has never been more clear,” said Bill McKibben, who spearheaded the protest. “That movement is being born right here in front of the White House and reverberating around the country.”

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline has become the most important environmental decision facing President Obama before the 2012 election and sparked nationwide opposition, from Nebraska ranchers to former Obama campaigners. A petition with 617,428 names [including mine] opposing the pipeline will be delivered to the White House today.

Over the course of the two-week sit-in 1,252 people were arrested, including top climate scientists, landowners from Texas and Nebraska, former Obama for America staffers, First Nations leaders from Canada, and notable individuals including Bill McKibben, former White House official Gus Speth, NASA scientist Dr. James Hansen, actor Daryl Hannah, filmmaker Josh Fox, and author Naomi Klein.

via A Climate Movement Is Born: Ozone Decision Spikes Total Arrests to 1,252 at White House Pipeline Protest | ThinkProgress.

When I lived in San Francisco, I used to walk right over the tops of cars that were in pedestrian pathways. Which was pretty frequent, considering the limited amount of available parking and the high density of cars. Indeed, because there are so many damn cars in San Francisco, it is considered one of the least safe cities in the U.S. for pedestrians and bike riders. (Of course, the self-righteous bikers would run over pedestrians, too, for getting in their way…)

So I can really relate to this Lithuanian mayor who decided to deal with illegally parked cars in a dramatic way.

Arturas Zuokas, 43, took the drastic action after becoming infuriated with motorists parking their luxury cars illegally around the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius.

The flamboyant politician decided to take the novel approach of fighting illegally parked cars by driving over them in a Russian tank [actually, an armored personnel carrier, but hey…).

He said: ”I wanted to send a clear message that people with big and expensive cars can’t park wherever they feel like and ignore the rights of pedestrians and bike riders.

Via Mayor runs over illegally parked car in tank

Here’s a cool rap video urging you to stop using all that plastic. This is in keeping with Plastic Planet, a documentary I reviewed here a while back. This video also puts me in mind of another film I reviewed, Gas Hole — which so totally missed the point about fossil fuels that I didn’t bother posting it here on Smart Energy (but you can read the review on Curled Up with a Good DVD).

Howard Zinn You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train

review by Brian Charles Clark
5 out of 5 possible stars
Directed by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller; narrated by Matt Damon

Originally published on Curled Up with a Good DVD

One day — I think it was a Tuesday — about 25 years ago, someone handed me a copy of a book and said, “You’ll love this.” The book was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. At the time, I was in college and had heavy stats and logic (if P then not Q and such nonsense) homework. I made the mistake of dipping into Zinn’s book over lunch and couldn’t stop reading for three days straight.

I was too young to have taken part in the radical ’60s and then in the ’70s – well, let’s forget the ’70s existed. In any case, I’d never heard of Zinn until I read A People’s History. But I quickly discovered that he was a member of a loosely affiliated cluster of radical activist philosopher-historians, a group that includes Noam Chomsky and many others, some of whom appear in this film. These activists were fighting the good fight against that relentless tide of greed called capitalism: they educated and advocated for civil and women’s rights, unions and labor rights, and against wars big and small, hot and cold. Read the rest of this entry »