If you don’t know how damaging plastics are to our environment here are two free showings on Earth Day 2011 – Friday, April 22 – of the movie BAG IT that will enlighten you and make you angry. Angry is good when it comes to more petroleum based products that we have shoved down our throats until they choke our landfills and oceans. The Greenius says, Ban Plastic Bags! Then force the manufacturers of those bags to clean up the mess they’ve made all over the planet.
How’d you like to enjoy 7-and-a-half miles of L.A. streets free of motorized vehicles and open only to bicyclists and pedestrians? Stroll, play, talk, celebrate -do whatever you want on the public street without sucking up gas fumes or fearing for your life from drunk drivers, texting drivers, drivers eating or putting on makeup or just plain dangerous behind the wheel lunatics.
That’s exactly the scene you’re going to get this Sunday, April 10 from 10am to 3pm at the second ever L.A. CicLaVia where public streets from Boyle Heights to Downtown, MacArthur Park to East Hollywood will be shut down to traffic and open to you and me emission free.
Sunday’s bike parade is part of that campaign and designed to call more attention to it. Not only will those Rolling AGainst Coal have a traveling good time together as we bike parade throughout the event, but we’ll be busting out the Creative Greenius with the decoration of our bicycles and the visual aides and props we also sport to raise awareness about the city’s addiction to coal and the life-saving difference Los Angeles could make if it fully commits to the green vision for a clean energy future! Get all the details you need after the jump.
If you’re worried about leaving our kids and grand kids a great big fat bill they’re going to have to pay for because of our multi-trillion dollar federal budget deficit, then stop worrying. Those numbers don’t mean squat and they won’t be a problem for our future generations. During my 53 years on the planet we’ve had deficits and we’ve had surpluses and it hasn’t meant a damn bit of difference to the kids or their parents.
It’s only made a difference to professional politicians who regularly wave the bloody shirt of deficits to try and scare the public and get them to spend less money on the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised and especially the environment while we simultaneously splurge like drunks in Vegas on phony wars, shameless subsidies for the dirty fossil fuel industries and tax breaks for rich people and big business.
But what do you expect from people in the political field whose business model is to constantly have their begging hand out while they ceaselessly hit you up for “campaign donations” so they can get elected and re-elected and then have their staff people do all the work while they themselves keep on fundraising. If you want to take financial advice from people of that ilk then you deserve to get conned and jacked.
But if you’d like a simple explanation of why you should just laugh at the fear of deficits then read on after the break for today’s enlightenment, courtesy of a commenter on Gawker.com
When I quit the Democratic party last summer the last straw for me was their total FAIL to take a stand and do anything about climate change. Watching their spineless jellyfish routine in the face of the unified madman approach the Republicans employed was cringe worthy to say the least.
The piss poor performance of California’s Assembly and Senate Democrats to deal with our state’s budget issues only made me feel more certain of my decision. And my personal experience working with certain Democrats at the local level helped convince me that they weren’t worthy of my loyalty or support any longer. They probably never were.
I was a registered Democrat from the time I turned 18 in 1975 until the summer of 2010. It was always an easy choice because the Republicans were so clearly the party of phonies, hypocrites and mean-spirited, self-centered, big business boot-licking, environment-hating pollution-lovers.
According to yesterday’s Environment and Energy Daily (subscription required): “Senator John Barrasso continued his campaign yesterday to stop the Obama administration from incorporating climate change into federal plans and policies, taking aim at an interagency report released in October that proposed ways for the federal government to respond to increased frequency of severe weather events and other effects of global warming.”
Barrasso, a rightwing whack job from Wyoming, introduced a bill (S. 228) that would bar the federal government from implementing any law or regulation related to climate change, whether it has to do with cutting industrial greenhouse gas emissions or not.
That might make some Bizarro Planet sense if Barrasso was just an ignorant dolt who didn’t have any education and knew nothing about science – but he can’t cop to that. Dude was a physician before becoming the Senator from one of America’s dirtiest coal producing states.
What kind of doctor looks at the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence of rapidly accelerating global warming and then decides we should pass a law keeping the feds from doing anything about it? I’m betting the kind who had his fingers crossed when he took the pledge to “first do no harm.” The kind who still probably recommends cigarette smoking to his patients to help them calm their nerves and improve their health.
The kind who doesn’t have the balls to just come out and say, “Look, my state is the number one coal producing state in the USA and I am not going to do anything to stop the world’s #1 source of climate changing greenhouse gases from doing whatever the hell they want to in order to keep their profits and payoffs spewing. If we’ve got to sacrifice the future generations to make that happen then so be it.”
The entire 2nd half of 2010 found the Greenius in a Mystery Spot where the rules of nature no longer applied....
Wow, March First already. Time do fly, don’t it? It has definitely been been awhile, hasn’t it? How you been?
Your beloved Greenius has been M.I.A. from this URL for all of 2011 – until now. Maybe you noticed, maybe you didn’t. Either way, I’m back and I’m returning with a new attitude, recharged energy and a fresh direction. I can only imagine how thrilled you must be.
After playing a more subdued, measured and politically correct role locally for the past two years I am soooo over that. I’m taking the gloves back off and cracking my knuckles. Consider me now unshackled, uncensored and unafraid. The perfect positioning for our What the Fuck? era.
I’d say “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” but hell I’m such an inherently nice guy at heart that no one would believe that… well, except maybe the gasholes who I’ll be metaphorically skewering like a razor sharp steel spike through a marinated lamb shish-kabob over burning hot coals. Doesn’t that sound like fun?
I put up with a lot of crap last year and some of it shook me to my core. I’ll be the first to admit it, I lost my mojo as 2010 wore on and it wasn’t pretty. Ennui and despair are a bitter and ugly cocktail to swallow, but that’s what was being served at the Green Bar for the last six months of 0h-ten and I drank enough to suffer a long hangover.
But I’m not hungover any more. And I’ve not only got my mojo back, I’m ready to have me some laughs. Seriously.
The Hermosa Beach Chamber of Commerce quietly parted ways with its executive director last week, telling local reporters only that it wanted to embark on “a new direction” that would include “more community outreach and more collaboration with local businesses and city government.”
Well I’ve got just the new direction the Chamber is looking for.
After eight months of working directly with Mayor Michael DiVirgilio to introduce and launch the Carbon Neutral City initiative, I stepped aside two weeks ago to focus more on the surrounding South Bay communities and to play a different role in Hermosa.
Creative Greenius 