Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water is, like, one of the greatest innovations of the last thirty years. Before bottled water was introduced in the marketplace, people had to drink out of taps, or “water fountains.” (This water was more or less free, but, hey, you get what you pay for.) Instead of having a conveniently disposable plastic bottle, people used to have to drink out of cups and thermoses and such, which, you can imagine, was very inconvenient.
Bottled water = convenient. And if that’s not a good enough reason to embrace a life-improving product, we can’t think of a better one.
Originally posted April 7th, 2013
By Michael Konik
We’ll never win a popularity contest, that’s for certain. We’re OK with that. To us, it’s more important to do what’s right than to be liked and admired and affirmed. That’s why we feel comfortable sticking up for society’s downtrodden, the friendless, powerless folks who bear the daily aspersions and derision of those who think them inferior. We love all our brothers and sisters. Even the ones no one else does.
Let us hereby celebrate smokers and litterbugs, two groups of people that consistently suffer unfair, unkind, and unhelpful criticisms.
The Los Angeles Times recently ran an editorial declaring that employers looking for job applicants who don’t smoke are making a big mistake. The paper thinks that avoiding smokers is a lamentable and unwarranted intrusion into an applicant’s private life. We agree! Employers with an eye on the bottom line – and is there another kind? – . . . → Read More: Sticking Up for Society’s Most Unloved
Originally posted November 11th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In the days preceding the storm of the century, two candidates running for President of the United States strenuously assured voters that they would pump more crude, frack more natural gas, and burn more coal than the other guy. Whether or not an energy policy built on a fossil-fuel paradigm could or could not be sustained wasn’t discussed, at least by Messrs. Obama and Romney, who proudly reiterated their fealty to the oil and mining companies that sign the checks. Virtually every other candidate for President –the ones who weren’t members of the Democratic or Republican crime syndicates, such as Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party — characterized our looming environmental disaster as the biggest threat facing America, not terrorism or the national debt, as the Military-Industrial complex would like us to believe.
Originally posted October 7th, 2012
By Michael Konik
He had a name that you might call Dickensian, except Barry Commoner, who died this week at 95, was anything but his nomenclature. A man of the people, yes. Common, no.
Barry Commoner was uncommon.
Today, millions of Earth’s inhabitants believe that overpopulation, increased affluence, and advanced technology are the root causes of environmental degradation. Back in 1971, when Commoner published his catalytic book, “The Closing Circle: Man, Nature, and Technology,” his ideas were considered radical, annoying, and revolutionary. Gasoline at the time cost 36-cents per gallon. Automobiles cost around $2,500. The phrases “peak oil” and “Middle Eastern jihadi” had not entered the lexicon. Many conservatives – those who liked things just the way they were – couldn’t understand why anyone would want to disrupt a fossil fuel energy model that seemed to provide human beings with a “better” . . . → Read More: In Praise of Barry Commoner
Originally posted August 12th, 2012
By Michael Konik
SINCE ORIGINALLY PUBLISHING THIS ESSAY, WE’VE COLLECTED NEARLY 2,000 PIECES OF LITTER IN RUNYON CANYON.
The results are in!
After nearly one week of highly un-scientific sampling, we’ve collected and analyzed the data. Literally.
During the test period, we visited Runyon Canyon, Hollywood’s celebrated nature area, and collected as much trash as we could carry – two handfuls and four pockets – between garbage cans. These receptacles are spaced about 200 meters apart (or less), conspicuously stationed beside the Canyon’s main hiking path, the paved one that climbs from the end of Sheryl Crow’s front gate on Vista Street to Mulholland Drive and the one-horse-three-car ranches in the Hollywood Hills. The garbage cans are green and have round bubble tops with swinging flaps; they look remarkably like garbage cans.
A surprising number of visitors to Runyon Canyon don’t seem able to locate them. Or maybe . . . → Read More: Litter Forensics
Originally posted August 5th, 2012
By Michael Konik
I was young like you once. Don’t laugh. It seems impossible, I know. An old codger like me of 77! You probably can’t picture when I was only 47 and healthy, with all my own teeth and a libido that didn’t yet require boner pills.
Sure, that was three decades ago, and I look a lot different, what with the thinning hair, sloping shoulders, and cute little pot belly. But my memory is still sharp, even with all the weed I smoked. I remember perfectly what we were like 30 years ago, back in ’12, and I’m glad your professor asked you to do this project. I’m glad you’re talking to the older generation. Folks like me know what America was like back then, back in the time of Obama. The USA was different.
Originally posted April 8th, 2012
By Michael Konik
Sometimes our chaotic, unknowable, seemingly random Universe arranges itself with perfect symmetry. In these moments of bracing clarity, authored by a Creator (in whatever guise or nomenclature you prefer) whose sense of irony is matched only by her/his/its sense of wicked humor, our innate foolishness and learned stubbornness are robbed of their pretensions. We see what we have wrought – and then pretend we didn’t, because, despite our professed wish for “change you can believe in,” change is the process we’re most unwilling to endure.
Last week provided several of those The Way It Is moments, with several illuminating events happening almost simultaneously, twinned like opposite sides of a coin, as though the worm-hole theories of modern physicists were getting an earthbound demonstration. Our chief prophet of change you can believe in, President Obama, who seems intent on being as big of a disappointment to as . . . → Read More: Perverse Priorities
Originally posted March 18th, 2012
By Michael Konik
In 1969, the Cayahoga River, one of Lake Erie’s major tributaries, caught fire. This provided the kind of visual evidence boring old science never could. Folks got hip: Industry, they realized, was using American waterways as a massive free sewage system for their most noxious waste. Americans got serious about pollution in our water for a minute. Then we all got back to business and tried to forget about the future.
Now our present generation of leaders and decision-makers has its own Compelling Visual to consider as they try to sell the easily sold American public on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in which a proprietary cocktail of water, sand, and toxic chemicals are blasted into shale fissures deep beneath the Earth’s surface. The blasting breaks apart the rock formations and causes them to give up oil and natural gas deposits. The Academy Award-nominated (and therefore Good . . . → Read More: What the Frack!?
Originally posted November 20th, 2011
By Michael Konik
Mr. Darwin has some ‘splaining to do.
Our species, which has managed to rise to the top of the food chain, conquer and colonize every region of the planet we care to inhabit, and control the fate of almost every other species unlucky enough to exist contemporaneously with humankind, seems to be partially exempt from the Theory of Evolution.
Sure, our spectacular advances in technology appear to be compelling evidence that we’re making progress, “improving” our existence by applying our superior intelligence to complicated problems that other creatures can’t solve. Want an iPad, Senor Gerbil? You might want to grow some thumbs! Life expectancy is longer – and by many measures healthier and altogether “better” (less violent, less frightening) than, say, 10,000 years ago.
But what kind of species is powerful enough to unilaterally destroy its environment, smart enough to understand the ramifications of its decisions, . . . → Read More: Evolutionary Doubts
Originally posted July 16th, 2011
By Michael Konik
This weekend Los Angeles is enduring what’s being called “carmageddon.” A 10-mile portion of the 405 Freeway, one of the major North-South arteries serving the Westside of LA County (and beyond), including LAX, is closed for 53 hours while a carpool lane is constructed and half of a bridge is demolished and rebuilt. Various degress of commuter paralysis, business disruption, and lifestyle disintegration have been forecast across every known media platform, as though this town were in the midst of a nuclear meltdown. In a city where the automobile is king, shutting down a freeway is akin to regicide.
For those of us who don’t own a car, however, this weekend’s predicted turmoil isn’t a disaster. It’s an opportunity.
Our hope is that all the folks who have let their machines dictate how they live their life — instead of owning cars, the cars own them . . . → Read More: Karmageddon
Luckily for Barack Obama, news of improper shenanigans at the IRS stole attention from the week’s biggest story: that the President’s Justice Department had secretly seized call information from at least 20 phone lines belonging to Associated Press reporters, including personal cell phones and the main switchboard of the AP’s Washington bureau. While Obama thundered on about “inexcusable behavior” at the IRS, he said he would “make no apology” for his latest foray into Nixonian…
News comes from Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, that a disastrous fire swept through a garment factory there, killing eight people. A factory fire in November killed more than 100.
The garment industry in Bangladesh is euphemistically called “loosely regulated,” so, regrettably, these things (fires and so forth) tend…
Were you aware that bottled water is “bad for the environment,” “bad for public water sources,” and “bad for your wallet”?
Neither were we! It’s pretty funny to think of something so obviously good – so amazing, when you think about it – as inherently evil, or something. Bottled water…
The commonly understood reason why terrorists wish to kill and maim Americans is because they hate our freedoms. That’s what’s behind all the civilian violence: they hate our freedoms. You can go ahead and enumerate all the freedoms the terrorists hate, but it doesn’t really matter which ones –freedom to…
The whole world is worried about North Korea. We’re not. We think locally. The area around which we can walk or ride our bike is our concern. We’re civic-minded that way.
Hollywood Boulevard is nearby. We walk on its sidewalks almost every day, often to access the subway, which serves…
Author James Goodale was chief counsel for the New York Times during the Nixon era. His new book, “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles,” outlines our government’s pernicious (and ongoing) threat to media freedom. Some prescient authors get all the luck: Every morning it seems we’re greeted to [...]
