Obama says that the candidate’s family is off the table. He means Sarah’s family. Okay. But what about the candidate herself? What kind of a person is she really? First off, she’s a truly died-in-the-wool conservative. Yet she glibly thinks that she can gather up the Hillary dems simply because they are both women. Well, that’s where the similarity ends between those two. Good grief. Hillary stands for everything that Sarah is against. I was definitely pro Hillary but now I’m pro Obama. Sorry, Sarah, this feminist simply cannot vote for you.

And then, of course, there’s Sarah’s personal stuff. In an interview today on NPR a gushing Alaskan delegate to the Rep convention said: well, she has raised five children. RAISED FIVE CHILDREN? What? One of them is only four months old, and a special needs child. I hardly call a four month old special needs child to be already raised. Won’t that little boy need to see his mom once in a while? And of course the other problem is Sarah’s pregnant seventeen year old. Where was Sarah when she was about to be sexually active? Off doing politics somewhere. Nobody was around to tell her what’s what. Of course, Sarah is against sex ed, especially in schools. I guess she must be against sex ed at home too. (Hello, Sarah, it is possible to raise little girls to grow into mature women who don’t accidentally have a baby.) Who is going to help that child-woman through what will definitely be a difficult pregnancy? She will probably be delivering it in January, Sarah could possibly be at the swearing in ceremony, not in the nursery helping her daughter and first grandchild (to say nothing of her own baby). Who will teach her how to be a mom? Sarah? I doubt it. Sarah wasn’t there for her daughter and she won’t be there for the rest of the family. As far as Sarah is concerned, her family is already raised. She has moved on to bigger things.

And then the other idea that the Reps are trying desperately to float is how much they embrace pregnant teenagers. Another one said today, again on NPR, that all families have the pregnancy problem. What? I had no idea that all the Reps families are so prolific. We all know they are anti-abortion, and against sex ed in school, but I thought they were pro-marriage, especially between a man and a woman. That means, obviously, between seventeen year olds too. Sarah is quick to point out that the seventeen year olds will be getting married soon. As if that will solve all their problems.

Of course, the reps tradationally ignore those unwed moms’ babies after they get out of the womb. They want to deny them access to day care, to health insurance, they would even deny school lunches if possible. The poorest people in the USA today are children, especially those of single moms. And poor families have a hard time making a living on the minimum wage, even though the dems wrung some money out of them after years and years of stone walling that responsibility. But according to Sarah, they will be married. But what do they know about being parents? What did Sarah teach them? Will either of them work? Will they be independent or will they be living in Washington, where the “help” will help raise these children?

And then there’s McCain. What was he thinking? Even though the reps are denying it, I don’t think they looked past Sarah’s winning smile when they decided to choose her. There are plenty of qualified reps that are willing and able to take on the job of VP. Isn’t it sort of a slap in the face to them to choose somebody like Sarah Palin? It seems pretty scary to me to think that McCain could make such an unwise choice for a running mate. He wanted to be daring, he wanted to do something that would take our minds off of the dems. (Of course, there is presidence for goofs in choosing VPs: remember little Danny Quail?)  I give you that Sarah is a smart and successful woman, but what about the price she is paying? I’m sure her family is very proud of her, but it really doesn’t look good for her family or for our country to have a person like her so close to the White House. She, like McCain, suffers from a serious lack of good judgment. And worse, McCain obviously thinks that VP is a job that really doesn’t matter in the long run.

There were 43 cars in today’s race. Shall we do the math? It’s a 500 mile race, the cars will each use approximately 100 gallons of fuel in their trip from nowhere to nowhere - an endless circle of speed. So that’s approximately 43,000 gallons of gas used in just one race today, and there are probably lots of speedway races going on around our country.

Lots of people watch the races AT THE TRACK. Maybe 100,000 folks on a good day attend these spectacles of boredom, watching cars running in circles trying to go nowhere faster than the car behind them, while they breathe polluted air and grow deaf as the speedsters roar by. Say there are 30,000 spectator cars and trucks at the track, and they drive an average of 25 miles to get to the track - some drive lots more, some less of course but for the sake of argument: that would be about 750,000 miles driven by the spectators. Say they average 15 miles per gallon. That gives us another 50,000 gallons of gas burned up in one day on this one race track. Isn’t that rather appalling!

And we could probably add another 50,000 gallons of gas when we consider all those trucks, trailers and RVs littering the center of the oval, all those camp followers drive thousands of miles every week, burning up the roads between tracks all over the country.
I’d love to be able to factor in the amount of pollution rising into the sky from the exhaust pipes, from the burned up tires and brake pads. I wish I could factor in the amount of sewage generated in one spot by all those people, the time wasted getting there, sitting there and then getting back home, the amount of junk food that’s eaten and the pile of garbage that is generated by those 100,000 people. It boggles my mind.

While this is horrendous waste of our country’s valuable and scarce resources are being burned up this afternoon, thoughtful and worried people around our country are trying to figure out how to save a mile or two while driving to run errands, are car pooling to work, spending lots of extra time using public transportation, doing whatever they can not to use an extra drop of gas. People are switching to more fuel efficient cars, are taking their lives in their hands bicycling and riding scooters to work, while wringing their hands at the rising cost of fuel. People are asking questions like: should I turn off my car’s engine while waiting at the red light? Should I drive more slowly? Should I, gulp, buy a hybrid?

And have you noticed that the news commentators are still talking about four dollar gas, as if that’s something awful. In California it has reached five dollars in many places.

Meanwhile at the track, the tracksters and speedsters simply raise the ticket prices to pay for the added expense and give no thought at all to what this sport is doing to our country.

There’s an item in Yahoo stating that 57 young men have been arrested in Saudi Arabia for flirting! Flirting is a crime there. Hard to imagine, right?

Does anybody not know that the US murder rate is higher than any other country in the world? Google it. Check it out for yourselves. While we mourned the 3,000 killed in the 911 attacks, 20,000 others were murdered during the same year. We kill off approximately 100,000 people in the US every ten years. Now that’s a crime. What do we do about it? Nothing really. If we told President Bush those statistics, he’d probably declare war on us, or, maybe Canada. After all, he went after Iraq for no real reason in order to avenge the 911 killings and in great fear that those evil doers might come after him again, and in the process probably a half a million people lost their lives (although we are trying every way possible to cover up those statistics).

Speaking of statistics, we have to recognize that some countries do not keep track of their murders: countries in Africa principally. Among the places in the world that do keep track of murders is Puerto Rico. That’s the only place with a higher murder rate than the US, but we own them! So they are really us.

Guns are the big culprit. Nations without guns have fewer deaths. If we eliminated the guns, murderers would have a harder time killing their victims. Yet we are too afraid to even try to get some of the guns off the streets. Unfortunately, our new hero, Obama, said the other day that he would do nothing about the gun problem.

It’s depressing, isn’t it?

If you’re like me, you are very happy that the new year has begun. All the Christmas stuff is out of sight for the next 10 months. Yeah. It will be back before we even know it.

FYI: for anybody who wants to make a “legitimate” comment to this site, you’ll have to register. The blog spammers caught up with me again. They are a ghastly bunch. They spew their horrible ads for awful stuff all over the comment pages. I do not want to see their advertising for porn sites, gambling venues or cheap phony meds on these pages. So, as a result, we all suffer.

Let’s hope together we can make a better world starting this very year.

Happy 2008!

We’ve just published the latest issue of Clever Magazine, www.clevermag.com, our first environmental issue. We asked for “good news” and we got some, but it’s not enough. As Al Gore pointed out in his Nobel speech, we must act quickly because “too late” is almost here.

In the meantime, the USA and China, the biggest polluters and the cause of the problem in the first place, are dithering. Unfortunately, the environmental crisis must be solved through political action. Individual efforts are not enough. That’s why the good news about individual efforts is not enough.

Both Bush administrations were firmly anti-environmentalist. The current Bush wants to turn back the clock to when we were even bigger polluters in the interest of oil men and run-away capitalism. It’s frustrating to watch our politicians doing nothing except blocking all bills and ideas that could help tackle this problem.

What On Earth will it take to start the US on the right direction? I’m thinking 2008 is the year that will bring us a change. We must ask all the presidential candidates what they intend to do about global warming and then choose accordingly.

Can the Earth wait that long?

The calendar says it’s still summer, right. I live in California, right? So why does it feel like winter this morning? The forecasters are telling us that there could be snow in the mountains. It feels like there will be snow on my lawn. Let’s blame it on global warming, which is probably the root cause of the sagging arctic jet stream which is what is bringing on this weather.

It’s amazing to me that the conservatives in our midst, and there are plenty of them, are still saying the evidence is not in yet regarding global warming. Or they are saying it’s just nature,  their shorthand for we cannot do anything to change it. Haven’t they have had their way long enough?

When you think about it for more than a second or two, the conservatives have stood in the way of every good thing humans have ever tried to do. They push their self-serving arguments to the max to keep any progressive changes from happening.  And then when they are finally cornered and bullied into making small changes that turn out to be very good policy, they take all the credit for it.

Today is another cold day in hell.

For all of you creepy souls out there who think you can infiltrate this blog with spam, forget about it. It isn’t going to happen this time. Move on. It’s time for you to be somebody else’s problem.

No spammers, get it?

This email just came thru from the National Resources Defense Council. Occasionally there is some good news!

 What follows is an email string from concerned people around the world, related to the Moonbear rescue efforts. If you are intrigued, please check out the Animals Asia website: www.animalsasia.org

I am so sorry to hear about Naji and write this e-mail in tears.  As you may remember, I visited Chengdu and got to see first hand the remarkable work that they do there.  As Cath said, Naji never knew anything but fun and freedom unlike most of the bears who have survived horrible torture. 

I was there before Naji was brought to the sanctuary but got to see Peanut and I am certain that there was no maliciousness towards him - very likely a rough-housing accident.  These bears are solitary souls in the wild and to see them play and cuddle together leads one to believe that perhaps their suffering was being rewarded with a lifestyle better than they would have known outside of the sanctuary.

While I mourn the loss of Naji I encourage you to continue your foster parent roles (perhaps for one of the babies coming out of Vietnam) as well as your role as educators.  There are some great sites on the web that you can link to and hopefully lead others to take on the fight for the Moon Bears.  Ongoing contests and fundraisers will only help others in the memory of one lucky little bear - the “Naji Fund”. 

You’ve done a great thing and while this is tragic, please do not let it stop you in your efforts to end the suffering.

I’m sadden by the news and my thoughts are with you both.

Sheri

Hi everyone

I’m afraid we have some very sad news for you all. A couple of days ago, our beloved Moon Bear cub “Naji” died suddenly. We are all devastated here at “Beary Cheap” & we know many of you will be upset by this terrible news. Rather than try & explain the circumstances, below is a copy of the email received from Jill Robinson at the Moon Bear Sanctuary in Chengdu, China.

Cindy & Derek

Dear everyone,I just don’t know where to even begin with one of the saddest messages I have ever written - and know this news will come as a terrible shock to you, as it has to everyone in

Chengdu. Naji died suddenly on Wednesday and, whilst no-one was there to see it happen, the lack of any associated noise and the wound itself looked to Cath and the vet team to be tragically “play gone wrong”. Naji was found just seconds after lunch with a wound in his lower abdomen which had caused him to bleed to death. He had been captured on video just minutes before playing with best friend Peanut in the enclosure outside.

This brave little bear had integrated so well into the natural enclosure of House 6 with disabled bears like Freedom, Prince, Douglas, the cubs, and all the other bears who welcomed this ball of naughtiness into the fold. After weeks of joyous play, Peanut is apparently wandering around listlessly looking for his friend and no-one on site can believe that he’s gone.I wasn’t there as am in the UK in the middle of our Roadshow but, over the past few hours since he died, the emails have been flooding in from our Chinese and Western staff just stunned and broken that something so unforeseen and premature has happened to our beloved Naji.One thought from Angela has comforted a lot of people - that Uncle Andrew is caring for him now - but I think it’s going to be a long, long time before anyone in Chengdu can come to terms with his death and, again, I am so, so sorry to be passing on this news.I’d like to leave you with Cath’s conclusion after a harrowing Post Mortem by our brave vet team who never in their wildest dreams expected to see him on the table, together with her beautiful poem, just for Naji, which was translated and read out at his funeral by a heartbroken team.On the afternoon of Wednesday 27th June Naji’s life was cut tragically short. An accident during play resulted in a deep wound to a main artery causing fatal blood loss. There was no sign that there was a deliberate attack. Needless to say, the loss of our lively, mischievous baby has left us all deeply shocked. There is some comfort in the fact that his passing would have been quick.  Thank you for all you gave in your short time with us Naji. RIP.——-Dear Naji,

During your life you knew love from the start
And when you arrived captured everyone’s heart.
So bold, full of mischief, naughty and fun,
You loved to play in the warmth of the sun.
You had good friends, both human and bear,
Who cherished your joy in a life free of care.
You brought us all laughter, you made us all smile
As you embraced your new life in your own Naji style.
Yet today we find ourselves saying goodbye.
Hearts heavy with grief, we can only ask why.
Your spirit too free to remain with us here,
Your soul so precious, forever held dear.
Your life was a happy one; you knew not the pain
Or the suffering of so many bears that remain
In their tortuous world. Tell them they’re not alone.
Hope will come again, one day they will come home.
So as you must go, then go with our love.
You live on in our hearts as we look up above.
Evermore in our thoughts, you left us too soon,
But your spirit shines on by the light of the moon.

Cath xxx 
RIP little Naji - we all loved you, Jillx