Before Holy Mountain

  Originally posted as a Facebook Note April 25, 2012. Litter (from Wikimedia commons) Yesterday afternoon I was meeting with some of my students at Brewed Awakenings when a driver on 1st Av caught my eye. He was driving a biggish car, stopped at the light at College Drive, and was trying to throw what looked like a Twix wrapper out the passenger side window. He threw it once... bounced back. Threw it again... bounced back. Finally, on the third attempt, he succeeded in throwing his trash out of his car and into the neighborhood.   Litterbugs disgust me, because of the utter needlessness of what they do. Hydraulic fracturing and clear-cutting--and driving cars, for that matter--are bad for the environment, but they have compensating value (energy, timber, transportation). All littering gets the sociopath who commits it is some momentary convenience. (Problem for libertarians: Even a marginal benefit to the individual in this case results in real cost to the society. The logic ...

Originally posted as a Facebook note July 19, 2008. My family and I braved the rain tonight and went for ice cream (or, rather, the ice cream-like substance known as "frozen custard") at Culver's. When we got there we found a crowd of young people on a church work trip to help flood victims. That was cool. What was not cool was listening to someone else next to us loudly rant about gas prices. He wants to drill in the Arctic (a small part of ANWR, the caribou won't even notice) and off the coast of Florida (the Chinese are already doing it, and so what if a little oil gets on the beach?). I pleaded with my family to move to another seat, but eventually had to go sit in the car to escape him. (Redolent it was of the scene in "Annie Hall" where Woody Allen produces Marshall McLuhan to put down the loud ignoramus in the movie line. Except real life isn't like that, and anyhow he would probably just have counterproduced Rush Limbaugh, and thin...