FROM NOTACOMMIE

See! Big Business can go green!

What Ray Anderson calls his “conversion experience” occurred in the summer of 1994, when he was asked to give the sales force at Interface, the carpet tile company he founded, some talking points about the company’s approach to the environment.
“That’s simple,” Mr. Anderson recalls thinking. “We comply with the law.”

But as a sales tool, “compliance” lacked inspirational verve. So he started reading about environmental issues, and thinking about them, until pretty soon it hit him: “I was running a company that was plundering the earth,” he realized. “I thought, ‘Damn, some day people like me will be put in jail!’ ”

FROM NOTACOMMIE

I am totally buying this.

FROM NOTACOMMIE

A friend sent me this article and it’s really wonderful. Gosh, we need to build a culture of life, and holy smokes, it’s scary once we start “screening” our kids…

FROM NOTACOMMIE

Green Architecture matters, and good stewardship is a Catholic issue. Why is this seen as a liberal fetish?

FROM NOTACOMMIE

I’m worried about the way it’s being framed, but any of my students who have had an abortion will point out they hated the experience, and while not all regret it, all wish they wouldn’t have had to do it.

However, while abortion clearly is not a good, it’s the right-to-abortion that is really in question.

But last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act marked a milestone for a different argument advanced by anti-abortion leaders, one they are increasingly making in state legislatures around the country. They say that abortion, as a rule, is not in the best interest of the woman; that women are often misled or ill-informed about its risks to their own physical or emotional health; and that the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus are, in fact, the same.

FROM NOTACOMMIE

This lieutenant-colonel would be able to talk back to my father in a way I had trouble doing. This article in Slate talks about another article written by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, deputy commander of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. He holds generals accountable from inside the military and, from what I understand, does it brilliantly.

The takeaway: Believe it or not, Iraq is going badly.

FROM NOTACOMMIE

I agreed with the ideas behind Farenheit 9-11, but I thought a lot of his tecnhiques were fairly dubious. I’m much more excited about his new movie on health care, Sicko.

FROM NOTACOMMIE

This is a lovely, though really long piece from NPR about how the DSM changed its position on homosexuality.

FROM NOTACOMMIE

So they found Chinese letters that are 8,000 years old! And these letters are very similar to the modern Chinese alphabet. Unbelievable! I love the history of language.

FROM NOTACOMMIE

Gosh–these exclamation points keep working. Anyways, Rudy’s odds with his pro-choice gambit are, well, intriguing. His numbers are now up, despite his stance on abortion, probably because he handled himself quite well in debates and is clearly strong on terror, etc.

The reasons I wouldn’t vote for Rudy have more to do with nepotism and a disregard for minority rights (talk to anyone in my inner-city Brooklyn neighborhood), etc., but I do admire the strong stance the guy is taking, and his consistency. He’s been great on immigration in the past, and I hope that will continue (though he’s been uncharacteristically wishy-washy).

Look: nobody wants abortion, except a few rare, diehard ideologues who think that any bend at all is tantamount to losing women’s suffrage. “Safe, legal, and rare” was Clinton’s concession, and I think that most of America is somewhere similar–they don’t like partial birth abortions but are unsure about illegalizing everything. Except James Dobson: he’s a different sort, and it’s people like him Rudy will have to get past for the primary nomination….let’s see.