Photography with the Left Eye

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.

Twisted and selfish. The tea party activists who complain about government “handouts” and then finance their activism via those same government handouts. Cynical, hateful and twisted.

Twisted, but in a nice way: Freya

I got the following hit and run comment on this post:

Yea. I don’t want my son sleeping next to a queer. NO GAYS IN BOY SCOUTS

Well, since this poster didn’t have the decency to leave a real name (or even a good fake name), I’ll just respond here.

Statistically speaking, your son is sleeping next to a queer (and may be a queer himself). There are lots of studies, and no firm conclusions, but it seems that somewhere between 5 and 20% of the population is gay; depending on how the study is conducted, the numbers stretch from 1-40%. In today’s society, young people with undefined sexuality are often unclear about it at 11 (initial scout age in the US) and still often don’t come out by 18 (exit age for scouts in the US). This was certainly true for my referenced nephew.

In any case, as repugnant as the current US Boy Scout policy is, it does not attempt to ban gay scouts; but to prevent them from attaining the rank of Eagle, which is the penultimate rank for scouts. So, the boy scouts will continue to let your gay son sleep next to queers.