...[R]eports from a range of scientific disciplines are telling us with certainty that we are making a mess of the earth, we are fouling our nest, and we have to act decisively and against our immediate inclinations. For we tend to be superstitious, hierarchical, and self-interested, just when the moment requires us to be rational, even-handed, and altruistic. We are shaped by our history and biology to frame our plans within the short term, within the scale of a single lifetime; and in democracies, governments and electorates collude in an even tighter cycle of promise and gratification. Now we are asked to address the well-being of unborn individuals we will never meet and who, contrary to the usual terms of human interaction, will not be returning the favor.

To concentrate our minds, we have historical examples of civilizations that have collapsed through environmental degradation -- the Sumerian, the Indus Valley, Easter Island. They extravagantly feasted on vital natural resources and died. Those were test-tube cases, locally confined; now, increasingly, we are one, and we are informed -- reliably or not -- that it is the whole laboratory, the whole glorious human experiment, that is at risk.

...
Whenever I get into this conversation with my friends, we all fervently agree that without an eco-friendly governmental policy – worldwide – the long-term future of human beings (and other large mammals) on this planet will be grim. But then comes equally fervent disagreement over how much each individual can or should do in the absence of government policy. I don’t mean whether we can all be like Goldman Environmental Prize winner Father José Andrés Tamayo Cortez - obviously not.

But what should we do when it comes to more mundane matters? Use public transportation more often? Stop eating meat growith fossil water and over-grazed public lands? Buy a composting toilet? Opt off the grid until hydrocarbons are out of the electricity-generating biz? Help kill the pesticide industry by spending more for organic lettuce and strawberries? Keep the air-conditioning off until room temperature hits 80? Light the house with compact fluorescent lights even though they’re ugly in some fixtures? Return that low-flow showerhead we yanked off one frosty morning? Remodel solely with often pricey green materials?

It’s a prodigious list of the big and the tiny, and after half an hour, the eyes of the SUV owners have narrowed into slits, a couple of vegans are having it out with the carnivores, and the sole owner of solar roof panels has tipped his nose way up into the air.

So, what have you done to make your personal life more environmentally sound? Be honest. Don’t tell us you bike 10 miles to work if you’re driving what Devilstower at Daily Kos christened the "Chevy Subdivision" on your commute.

In the morning, cranes shuffle up and down the river waiting for the sun to pop up over the horizon. As the sun rises, cranes head out to feed and loaf in the surrounding fields. During the day, cranes "dance" to relieve the stress of migration and strengthen pair bonds. Cranes are very "social" birds and in the evening, congregate in wet meadows before heading back to the river for the night.

Cranes are omnivorous, eating both plant and animal materials. With the abundance of cropland in the Platte River valley, corn makes up nearly 90 percent of their diet, providing carbohydrates for fat production. Wet meadows along the river provide invertebrates that make up the remainder of their diet. Worms and snails provide protein, with the snail shell being a source of calcium that is essential for egg development.
There are six subspecies of sandhill cranes, of which three are migratory and three non-migratory. Two of the non-migratory subspecies are endangered: the Mississippi and Cuban sandhill crane. All of the migratory subspecies pass through Nebraska and their populations are thriving (~600,000). The most numerous is the lesser sandhill crane, which is the smallest subspecies. The Canadian sandhill crane comprises about 15 percent of the birds staging along the Platte, and the greater sandhill crane about 5 percent.

The wings of a crane are approximately six feet long. Cranes are lazy fliers, relying on thermals to carry them along. Thermals are rising columns of warm air, and when southerly winds start to blow, you will see cranes testing them for flight conditions. Sometimes during flight, the upward wingbeat is very quick, giving cranes a mechanical look. Cranes ride thermals so efficiently that they have been seen flying over Mt. Everest (~28,000 feet).

An adult sandhill crane is between three and four feet tall and weighs 6 to 12 pounds depending on the subspecies. Adults have bright red skin patches on their crowns and are usually gray with brown stains. Juveniles have brown skin patches and can be dark grey to brown in color. Crane's can also stain their feathers by preening after they have been probing the ground for food.

Their bills and feet are important tools. A crane's bill is very sharp and sturdy, useful when probing frozen soil. The edges are serrated to grasp slippery food like worms and snakes. Not only is it used for preening, it is also used as a weapon.

The feet and legs work in conjunction with the beak. The foot has three long toes with claws on the end. These claws are very sharp and can be used for scratching in dirt to find food and for protection. When a crane is threatened, it will use its wings to maintain its balance and then jump up and strike at the attacker with its feet.

When medieval European nobles decided they wanted to take a road trip - preferably one that would provide them with an opportunity to draw upon their core skills as rapists, plunderers and dashers-of-baby-brains-against-rocks -- they turned to the Bible for moral guidance. And, under the patient tutelage of priests and popes they discovered that God would in fact be very enthusiastically supportive of princes, barons and assorted thugs setting off to reach the big Holy Land Souvenir and Gift Shop where they hoped to pick up pieces of the True Cross.

When the Spaniards reached the New World and discovered that it was populated by people known to Christendom as "future slaves" they found in the Bible all the support they needed to carry on their holy work of slaughtering children, raping women and incinerating Aztec priests. (Granted, the Aztec priests had it coming.)

Whenever Christians have found it necessary to deal with heretics, there was the Bible, their moral guide, ready to support them in their desire to stretch an Albigensian out to twice his normal length.

And when, on occasion (about five centuries, give or take) Catholics felt it advisable to massacre Protestants, or Protestants thought it might be helpful to slaughter Catholics, both sides reached into their ever-present Bibles and came up with all the theological support they needed.

Here in the United States the Bible was in one hand and the whip in the other as slave masters drew upon holy writ to justify selling children away from their parents, working their fathers to death, raping their mothers and then, with something approaching perfect efficiency, enslaving the resulting progeny.

Run, Injuns, run, the Lord says right here in this chapter, in this very verse, that I have the right, even the moral obligation, hallelujah, to burn you out, starve you out, and hound you through forest and across plain till you're exterminated, praise be.

Put a sheet on your head, string up a black man, castrate him and set him on fire? Absolutely, and let's sing Onward Christian Soldiers as we do it.

Every foul, malicious, cruel act that pops into the mind of a believer can somehow be rationalized in biblical terms. When it comes to justifying atrocities by the faithful the Bible is everybody's bitch. And what is so lovely is that this Bible is solemnly asserted to be the eternal and unchanging word of God.

Within living memory -- in fact, within my own personal memory -- the Bible has been used to justify official racism. God apparently was very concerned that whites and blacks not share drinking fountains. And certainly they should not be marrrying and, here is the crucial point, in order to see that God's will be done, in order to make sure that the US of A stayed right with God, we needed to write and enforce laws that made it a crime for whites and blacks to commingle. Again, this was not a million years ago and far, far away. This was in my life, in this country, right here where I'm sitting in North Carolina. Thus spake the Lord in 1959: niggers keep out.

And now, fresh as we are from discovering that the unchangeable Word of God actually doesn't kind of support slavery, and maybe wasn't all that favorable on the topic of torturing heretics after all, and just possibly did not really endorse genocide (oops, sorry guys, wanna build a casino?), and gosh, who knew, didn't even call for keeping black people as a permanent underclass, Bible scholars have dipped into the big book's endless ambiguity and come up with yet another divine decree: faggots should not be marrying other faggots. Thus spake the Lord, as we clearly see in this chapter and that verse and really, there is no possibility, none, none whatever, that this time we might be wrong like we were in every other case where the Lord seemed to call for us to treat our fellow man like shit.

I'm an atheist. Unlike many of my ilk (and we are an ilk) I've actually read the Bible cover to cover. Okay, I skipped some of the begats, and I probably lingered over portions of Solomon longer than strictly necessary, but I've read the Book. And here's what I know: I can find biblical justification for shooting you as you walk out of a McDonald's carrying a cheeseburger. Literally. The Bible is quite clear on the subject of mixing meat with any other product of the same animal. Like beef and cheese. In fact, if you weighed all the biblical references to food, against all the biblical references to homosexuality, you could fairly conclude that God cares a lot more about the kitchen than he does the bedroom. And yet I've never heard off a Christian demanding that we close McDonald's. (Can we at least torture the clown?)

When I read the New Testament, or what fundamentalists refer to as "Revelations and some other stuff," what I see is Jesus beating this message: show some compassion, show some mercy, show some generosity, show some humility, and don't presume to judge your fellow man because I am God, asshole, and you are not. (I paraphrase.)

We are not a theoccracy. This is not Iran or Afghanistan. Sorry, various TV preachers, Jesus is not in the Constitution. The Bible is a religious document intended for the moral guidance of believers -- a fact which must humilate God no end. It cannot be relied on as a guide to cheeseburgers (illegal) or adultery (death penalty called for) or money lending (goodbye Citibank) or slavery (sure, why not?) or gay marriage.

As the court in California has pointed out there is no rational basis for denying marriage to gays. None. Zero. And twenty or thirty years from now the Christians and Jews who are today condemning it with Bible references will develop the same amnesia as their parent's developed on the subject of miscegenation and segregation.

This is not a Right vs. Left, Republican vs. Democrat issue. The Dems have been as contemptibly gutless as the Republicans have been nasty. The issue here is whether we have in this country two different and unequal classes of citizenship: Americans with full benefits, and Americans with something less. I consider it a moderate position to maintain that every American, whether they are Mayflower descendents or Dad just waded the Rio Grande, whether they are rich or poor, black or white or any other color, Christian, Jew, Muslim or none-of-the-above, straight or gay, is equally an American citizen.

A Giant Step Forward for Punctuation¡
Introducing the long-awaited sarcasm point.

The English language must evolve. Not with emoticons or lol or brb or l8r or GRATUITOUS all caps used for emphasis, not with Spanglish or bumbling Bushisms or even cryptic Kerryisms. We don't need more quotation marks that "hedge" or try to make the same "old" thing sound "fresh." What we need is an honest effort to incorporate the way we live today. My fellow Americans, we need to embrace a new punctuation mark—one that embraces the irony and edge of contemporary conversation and clarifies rather than condenses or confuses.

It is time for the adoption of the sarcasm point. Why the sarcasm point? We have a mark that conveys that we mean or know something. We have one that says it with volume and force! We have one that communicates that we don't know something, don't we? We need one more: to do for language what shade did for drawing, what color did for television, and what eyebrows did for expressions—introduce finesse.

The problem is simple. We live in a whiplash, light-speed world in which motion can range, within minutes, from standstill to supersonic, decibel levels range from NPR to Limbaugh, and the range of sincerity can shoot from earnest to irreverent in nanoseconds.

Believe it or not, the world we've landed in is not only more image-obsessed than we've ever seen. It's also more text-based than ever. We finger-type and we thumb-type. We e-mail, we IM, we blog. And the forms cannot contain the content. There's a dastardly disconnect. Among other things, it makes Dave Barry columns somewhat difficult to read. Someone must step into the sarcasm chasm¡

I'm serious¡ See, there are people who are relentlessly sincere. So, what are they supposed to do when they're trying to sound a bit bitter? Suppose you're IM'ing that oft-earnest friend you have, and he writes: "I need to go to church tomorrow and confess the jealousy in my heart." You forget—have you ever heard him say nice things about God or do the opposite? "Wait … do you really?" "Sorry. I mean, I need to go to church tomorrow¡ To confess my jealousy¡ And the fact that I just renewed my subscription to Maxim¡" "Oh. Me too. Only as a Jew, I must do these things in synagogue¡"

And then there are people who are relentlessly sarcastic. How do we know when they're being straight? The other day my brother told me he respected Colin Powell. I had no idea what he was trying to say.

The sarcasm point can strengthen our communities and unite our broader culture¡

Sarcasm purists, Norm McDonald, and his acolytes might be troubled by all this talk. Good sarcasm, they'll tell you, is cueless. It trips dishonestly off the tongue. "What I'm looking forward to in prison is the prospect of anal rape." Telegraph your insincerity and the thrill is gone. Announce it and your friends won't experience the same delight in the spasm of sarcasm you use to praise the president.

The other day I told my girlfriend I loved her. I did it on Yahoo! Instant Messenger. And the sarcasm just didn't come across.

I grant that blue states will be at the vanguards in anointing the new sarcasm point. We'll use it in our MoveOn action alerts. We'll teach it our public schools, in those grammar classes they fail to teach. We will type it with excitable hands in Bruckheimer scripts and lace it in our advertising.

Red states will be slower to come along, perhaps. The first sarcasm point won't work its way into the Republican Party platform until 2028, into a Georgia English textbook until 2032, and won't appear in a prayer book until, I'm guessing, 2080. But the spread will be inevitable, kind of like civil unions.

Williams Safire and F. Buckley, chiefs of the language police, are retiring not two moments too soon. Let the organized grammatical crime commence¡

Do yourself a favor. Begin today. Suck in and cough out this little virus of an idea. Beam the meme. Use it at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and funerals¡ Try to keep it under wraps at gay coming out parties.

I mean it¡

And since I'm going to copyright this bugger, you'll have to type¡© But don't worry. You can take the copyright symbol ironically.

KALAMAZOO, Michigan (AP) -- Commentator and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan cut short an appearance after an opponent of his conservative views doused him with salad dressing.

"Stop the bigotry!" the demonstrator shouted as he hurled the liquid Thursday night during the program at Western Michigan University. The incident came just two days after another noted conservative, William Kristol, was struck by a pie during an appearance at a college in Indiana.

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