Photography with the Left Eye

B2Evolution broke a plugin that I rely on in order to do the cool photo pop out when you click on a photo, so I’ve decided to switch to Wordpress.

Click here to go the continuation of the blog!

P.S. I’ve also disabled comments, because they’ve been 100% spam, and I got tired of deleting them. If you have a comment, you can email me. And you’ve have to do the easy work of figuring out my email addy.

Ben and Jerry’s used to have a corporate rule that the highest paid person in the company could not be paid more than a modest multiplier of the lowest paid employee. They’ve dropped that, but I think it was useful to them as a company, and a lesson to our society. As the chasm has grown between the haves and the have-nots, one casualty is the understanding of the rich of what it means to be poor, or even to be merely comfortable. That’s why our roads are crumbling while some people have many $100,000+ cars, why airplane travel is miserable for most but fabulous for a few, and why our schools suck at educating so many of our youth, while private schools do very well.

Sage

BP has given us 100 days of what might be the worst environmental disaster to hit the US. They are on the hook for billions of dollars of civil liability, and enough information has already come out to suggest that there are people at BP who are also criminally liable.

Some people are reacting by saying we should boycott BP. Taking the long view, virtually every oil company is guilty of a big disaster. Exxon had the Valdez, Union Oil Company (now owned by Chevron) the Santa Barbara Oil spill…the list goes on. The only effective boycott would be to boycott them all. A good start would be buy way less gas and other petroleum products. Get out of your car, onto mass transit. Buy a much more fuel efficient car. And (even though your electricity is likely not generated with petroleum products) make your home and business more energy efficient.

Jade

A District court found that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional. The decision was in April, and the court allowed the observance, which was last week, to go ahead.

Undoubtedly, there will be an appeal. It (and any higher appeals) should fail. Let’s analyze the likely arguments a bit.

The proponents of a national prayer day will say that a day does not violate the Establishment Clause because it does not favor any religion. Not so. By its nature, a National Day of Prayer favors those religions that express their spirituality through prayer. That represents a subset of the 4,200 or so religions in the world, though probably a significant subset. However, even among those, prayer as a publicly proclaimed exercise is not universal. I’m not a theologin, and I certainly have an incomplete understanding of most of the major world religions, but I would venture to say that the notion of a National Day of Prayer is a concept that would only be fully embraced by Christian sects. Therefore, the Day fails, on a very straightforward basis, to pass First Amendment muster.

Note that the court’s decision does not, in spite of heated headlines to the contrary, state that prayer itself is unconstitutional.

Anyway….

supbe

Blue footed ones, that is.

Hello after a hiatus and a journey to the Galapagos islands.

Political note of the day:

Here’s a car I shot in Ecuador.

It could never be sold in the US. The creationist crazies would try to chase Chevrolet out of the country.