Metacentricities

• Get your 62 MPG diesel from Volkswagen soon!
• Carbon Sequestration (the technology to sequester, instead of release CO2 from Coal plants won’t be much help to us.
• When given the choice, consumers choose green energy.
• Carnival of the Green brings lots of cool info about everything green.
• Check out TreeHugger TV. There’s some nice stuff there - TV worth watching.
  

technorati tags:environment, energy, cars

I haven’t had much time to write blog entries today, or will I tomorrow, because I’m moving. I became the house manager for my dorm, called Benton, and because of that I get this cool new room that is way bigger than my old room, and looks out on the Bay! Cool! Sunsets every evening!

Moving is a hassle, of course, but it will be over soon, and I’ll be in my new room. That will be nice.

Anyway, there are some flickr photos of the room (procrastination from moving.)

I heard about this in an announcement in church this morning, then saw it in a Salon article. In Pittsburg, a number of women are going to be ordained as priests.

Declaring herself "present" (in Latin, ad sum), each of the 12will be ordained priests or deacons by women bishops — themselvessecretly ordained to the episcopacy by active Roman Catholic malebishops whose names will remain locked in a vault until they die.

There is an active movement, called womenpriests, who are risking excommunication (a big deal for Catholics) in order to move forward, and ask the question about why women can’t be ordained into the Catholic priesthood.

By their visibility and accessibility, a small band of women areforcing a confrontation. They are asking, Is sexism a sin? How does thechurch reconcile its teaching that women and men are created in God’simage, that once baptized, there is "no male or female" and "all areone in Christ Jesus," with its contention that women cannot representthe ultimate sacred or hold ultimate power through ordination becausethey are, literally, the wrong "substance"?

Anyway, this is going to be interesting to watch. And it is certainly an article worth reading.

technorati tags:catholic, women, ordination

As you know, I don’t comment a whole lot on the gay marriage issue, for a variety of reasons. However, there is an op-ed in todays New York Times by Dan Savage, about the recent court decisions in Washington State and New York, that is just amazing. Salient quotes:

In New York, the court ruled in effect that irresponsible
heterosexuals often have children by accident — we gay couples, in
contrast, cannot get drunk and adopt in one night — so the state can
reserve marriage rights for heterosexuals in order to coerce them into
taking care of their offspring. Without the promise of gift registries
and rehearsal dinners, it seems, many more newborns in New York would
be found in trash cans.

and …

These defeats have demoralized supporters of gay marriage, but I see
a silver lining. If heterosexual instability and the link between
heterosexual sex and human reproduction are the best arguments
opponents of same-sex marriage can muster, I can’t help but feel that
our side must be winning. Insulting heterosexuals and discriminating
against children with same-sex parents may score the other side a few
runs, but these strategies won’t win the game.

Anyway, it has Dan Savage’s signature humor, and a lot of good points.

technorati tags:gaymarriage

As the events of Israel’s war in Lebanon, as well as the US war in Iraq, and interest in Iran and Syria play out, and the rhetoric of “war on terror”, or “sectarian violence” get bandied about by just about everyone, it is critically important that we understand something. The major underlying factor in all of this, really, is the conflict for dwindling, but essential resources.

Michael Klare, in the not-so-new-anymore book Resource Wars, talks about this issue much more cogently and in detail than I could. But I think it’s worth talking about here, given the present situation.

Most of us take both oil and water (less so oil these days) for granted. We fill up our gas tanks (and, perhaps lately, cringe) and we drink our water from the tap or the bottle. But we don’t often think much about were it came from, and what had to happen in order for us to get it.

All lefties know that protest cry “no blood for oil” - we have understood for a long time that the US interests in the MIddle East are about oil, and easy access to oil. There is a good article in Energy Bulletin this week about the relationship between the war in Lebanon and oil. I think that most of us understand that Condi’s “birth pangs of a new Middle East” are about a Middle East that the west (US in particular) can control, in one way or another, so that it’s rich oil resources will be available for us.

Less known is the issue of water. There have been conflicts between Israel and Lebanon over water for years. MyDD asks some very pointed questions about this issue, and I’d have to concur with their point of view. There is a great page on mideastweb that talks about this issue as well. MyDD asks about the relative use of water by Israel and the surrounding countries, as well as the Palestinians. I can’t answer this question specifically, I think that would take a lot of research, but I did find a really cool database of the Land and Water Development Division of the FAO (Food and Agriculture organization) of the United Nations (thank God that we have the United Nations.) Anyway, here are some interesting cogent facts from that database. (If you are a data analysis fan, play with it, it is really amazing.)

Israel has had a mean population density of 280.6 inhabitants per square kilometer over the course of 1995-2005. Lebanon has had a density of 341.5 inhab/square km for that same time period. However, Israel has drawn an average of 76.65 % of it’s available renewable water resources, while Lebanon has drawn 20.37%.  (Israel has a GDP of 123,526 million USD, and Lebanon has a GDP of 22,052 million USD) In the end, it’s all back to issues of how we live our lives. We can’t escape that a lifestyle (like we, or Israel live) creates stresses on our environment and resources that cannot be sustained, and, in the end, will cause war and suffering.

Unless people start talking plainly about how the resource-intensive western lifestyle directly and indirectly causes many of the problems we are seeing in our world today we will keep going around and around issues of “terrorism” and “sectarian violence” and this and that, and ignore the elephant in the room.

technorati tags:water, oil, israel, lebanon, middleeast, environment, resources, un

Well, when I change a name, I really change a name!

Please change your bookmarks for this blog to: http://www.metacentricities.com

And the new feed is: http://www.metacentricities.com/index.rdf

The old URL and feed will work fine, but it would be great to use the new one.

Update: The old feed actually doesn’t work, it turns out. Sorry for the inconvenience!

I have been watching what has been happening in the Middle East with real sadness. I sat across a cafe table with a friend of mine with tears in her eyes. It is heartbreaking, from the children being killed, to the effects it has on people from a distance.

This crisis is, in some ways, thousands of years in the making. But it is also very much a product of a troubling combination of neoconservative viewpoints about Middle Eastern hegemony, and an  apocalyptic Christian worldview that sees this conflict as inevitable.

All the while, children die.

technorati tags:israel, lebanon, war, children

Well, working with someone who had a visit by the naming fairy sure did help. The new title of the blog is meant to reflect both the varied kinds of things that I write about here, as well as the fact that I am very interested in the intersections of things, where things meet. And, it’s a cool word. Back to our regular programming…

Some say that the oil sands in Canada will be an answer to our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. It appears that this could be true, but at an enormous environmental cost. That link above to the Wikipedia article details some of the issues, and a new article in Energy Bulletin (something anyone who is at all interested in energy issues should read) is pretty damning.

The mining-extraction process requires about 750 cubic feet of natural
gas for every barrel of bitumen, according to the non-governmental
Pembina Institute report “Oil Sands Fever”. The “in situ” process that
pumps super-hot steam 1,000 metres underground requires 1,500 cubic
feet of natural gas to produce a single barrel of oil.

This doesn’t sound like such a good equation. Add to that issues of the toxic waste produced in the process of extracting the oil, and this is really, really not a good idea.

technorati tags:oilsands, oil, environment, tarsands, canada

In the interest of learning more, and dialogue, I tend to read one or two Christian-oriented blogs that are more conservative than I am. I tend not to go the Jesus Politics route, so I don’t read people like Al Mohler very often (because doing that so stretches my ability to follow my 4 guidelines.)  But I did happen upon a blog that is part of Christianity Today, which is a conservative evangelical magazine (I think probably the most popular one.) It is called "Out of Ur."

They are having fascinating discussions about whether or not conservative politics are a barrier to the gospel and, interestingly, whether or not consumerism undermines Christian faith. That post says:

When we approach Christianity as consumers rather than seeing it as a
comprehensive way of life, an interpretive set of beliefs and values,
Christianity becomes just one more brand we consume along with Gap,
Apple, and Starbucks to express identity. And the demotion of Jesus
Christ from Lord to label means to live as a Christian no longer
carries an expectation of obedience and good works, but rather the
perpetual consumption of Christian merchandise and experiences—music,
books, t-shirts, conferences, and jewelry.

No, I wouldn’t put it that way, of course, but she’s got something there. It seems that in this country, we do a lot of that with spirituality in general - it becomes something to consume, a brand to identify with, not something to live.

I am really interested that they are having these conversations.

Hat tip to The Corner, who liked my sermon.

technorati tags:christianity, religion, consumerism, conservative, evangelical