I was listening to NPR's All Things Considered yesterday when a passing comment by movie critic Bob Mondello struck a nerve. What presumably was intended as a review of The International turned into a dismissal of movies that portray corporations behaving amorally in the pursuit of profits.

"In Michael Clayton," he for-exampled, "a lawyer played by Tom Wilkinson despairs, saying he's spent 12 percent of his life 'defending the reputation of a deadly weed killer.'

"Outside the multiplex, though, we tend to think of most of these corporate entities as necessary pillars of society. We need our weed killers, after all; though that doesn't mean we trust the chemical companies that make them."

We need weed killers? Well of course we do. Freedom from dandelions is one of the basic necessities of our modern life. We need weed killers like we need bottled water and disposable razors. Without them we might be reduced to drinking from the tap, sharpening and reusing our straight razors, and even pulling weeds with our own hands!

Therein lies the problem with our modern society. The toxic memes planted in our unsuspecting minds by the subliminal hucksters of Mad Ave (never was there a more appropriate moniker) have driven us to such a constant state of psychological neediness that we can no longer distinguish mere conveniences from real needs. We think it's more important to know which starlet is dating her former gardener than to understand what the chemicals we apply to our own gardens and lawns do to our health and that of our children.

Problem with the GOP's image is that it's dead on

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says the GOP is in danger of becoming a regional party if they don't market themselves better.

McConnell called on the GOP to push back against labels that have hurt the party in the past — anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment — and to regain taxpayers’ trust that they support limited government spending.

“Too often we’ve let others define us,” McConnell said. “And the image they’ve painted isn’t very pretty.”

No, Mitch, your actions have defined you. And you need to change more than your sales pitch to become relevant again. You need to change your behavior. You're labeled anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment because you are anti-immigrant, anti-union and anti-environment. To the extent that you have an image problem, it's because the image is accurate. The right wing has pulled the wool over the eyes of too many people for too long; but as famously said the great man on whose coattails your party still tries to ride, you can't fool all the people all the time.

The Fourth Estate awakens

"Right on cue," writes Eric Boehlert, "the White House press awakens from its Bush slumber."

Having hammered Bill Clinton for eight years over everything from haircuts to blowjobs, the press handled George W. Bush with kid gloves from day one. Pundits at the time noted that it was about time the press gave the new guy a break.

Then, having slept through eight years of outrageous deceit and secrecy, not to mention open contempt of the press, on the part of the Republican regime, the press has suddenly reawakened and decided to play hardball with the Obama administration. ABC News' executive producer says he doesn't think there is a honeymoon, and the Daily Beast exults "Game on!"

Some of the issues that have the press in such an uproar include misspelled names of press staffers and phone lines that weren't properly connected on the first day, and - gasp! - the White House handing out official photos of the Presidential Oath of Office do-over rather than letting the AP photogs in to snap their own pix. This was deemed such a slight that the AP, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse refused to move the images, and CNN's Ed Henry complained to Wolf Blitzer that on the very same day Obama was talking about transparency, "we were not let in."

Politico noted how the Clinton administration had also run into trouble with the press over issues of access. Noticeably absent from the Politico article was any mention of how the Bush administration dramatically limited media access, regularly cordoned off information from the press, and warned reporters that edgy questions posed at the daily sessions were "noted in the building." That's all been tossed down the memory hole. It's only new Democratic presidents who are asked to play nice with the press and get badgered when they do not.

That's the damned liberal media for you.

Living history

Two words. President Obama.

Make that three words. President Obama: YES!

Reason number 4,731 why I'm glad I have a Mac

At the office, we've had a spate of user complaints about a particular application giving an error message that goes something like this:

"Sorry, we were unable to process your request at this time. If you are unable to continue working, please dismiss this warning and then select View, Refresh from your browser's menu."

Someone associated with the product in question produced the following list of "possible solutions":

- Disable Pop-Up blocker
- Clean up spyware (use application such as Spybot and/or AdAware)
- Add [webapp] server to Internet Explorer's Trusted Sites zone (this may be a good idea for any other intranet servers or via an Active Directory policy)
- Clear out Java Cache by running
C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_0X\bin\javacpl.exe
---Click “Delete Files” then click “OK”.
---*if there are different versions, do this for each version or uninstall older versions and leave only the newest copy.
- Clear out Windows temp folders.
--- C:\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temp
--- C:\Documents and Settings\USER PROFILE\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
--- C:\Winnt\Temp
--- *Clear out the Temp/Temp. Internet Files for each user listed in the Documents and Settings folder.
- Reset IE to default settings.
--- Right Click on the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop or go to Control Panel and open Internet Options.
--- Click on the Programs Tab. Then click the Reset Web Settings button. Uncheck “Also reset my home page” then click “OK”.
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Use HTTP 1.1" (you may need to enable it because sometimes IE just doesn't like the setting. I have actually seen it start working by enabling this option.)
- Tools > Internet Options > Advanced > Disable "Do not save encrypted pages to disk"
- Download the MSXML 4.0 SP2. This link will get you to the download. I selected the msxml.msi.
- Clear Browser Cache
- Delete [product A] or [product B] class file
- If one is currently installed, upgrade to the latest Sun JVM
- Windows Update (also verify that a recent Windows Update has not broken this!)
- Reboot
- Defrag
- Run a tool such as Symantec/Norton WinDoctor

I was going to rant about it, but this list speaks for itself. I'm glad my Mac just works.

Louisville plays Austin Peay tomorrow

The ninth-ranked Cardinals play the OVC champion Austin Peay Governors tomorrow. In case you're not familiar, Peay is pronounced like the letter. Or the vegetable. Or...

Now they're weakening the Endangered Species Act

Yet another "midnight regulation" from the lame duck Bush administration removes "a provision that requires Fish and Wildlife Service scientists to make sure that endangered species won't be harmed by federally approved logging, mining and road-building projects," according to public-interest journalism site ProPublica.

"Now those reviews will be conducted by other federal agencies, like the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Highway Administration."

ProPublica also explains why it will be difficult for Obama to reverse the rule changes. They also have a page that tracks a great many more Bush League midnight regulations. It is truly amazing how many things these criminals are putting in place to gut environmental protections and civil rights. It's as if they were intent on destroying as much as they can on their way out - contaminating our drinking water, mining uranium on the brink of the Grand Canyon, loosening endangered species protections, stripping protections from wilderness areas, lowering air quality standards... allowing federally-funded institutions to deny abortion requests for religious reasons, expanding police surveillance authority, limiting employee access to medical and family leave time... the list goes on and on.

Fortunately, the site also shows which rule changes are still open for public comment and which are closed, finalized, or already in effect. If you can find a few minutes, take a look. Send in your comments on the ones that are still open, and write your representatives about the ones that are under OMB or Congressional review. Once these things go into effect, it can take years to reverse them.

UPDATE: I've also added ProPublica to the blogroll. For some reason, the blogroll is working intermittently on the main page; however, it still works consistently on individual post pages. So if you don't see the blog list, just click on the title of any post and they should appear.

County Fair: NYT's lame effort to hype the Blagobama meme

The MediaMatters County Fair blog summarizes how the media seem to be trying to promote the idea that Rod Blagojevich's "pay for play" scandal has somehow tainted Barack Obama:

...in order for the Beltway press to gin up the Blago story this week, basic journalism guidelines had to be set aside and in some cases brazenly ignored. That's the only way this story worked because simply reporting the facts as presented by the prosecutors would have made it painfully clear that, in terms of Obama's involvement, there was none. In fact, Obama had thwarted Blago's money-making scheme.

But that wasn't the story the press wanted to tell. (i.e. Obama the reformer rebukes corrupt local pol.) So lots of reporters and pundits consciously, and often systematically, took it upon themselves to make the story more appealing.

Of course the sources used in all the stories implying Obama's career is tarnished because he happens to be from Illinois are... drum roll please... Republican leaders. But that fact is always buried several paragraphs deep in stories that breathlessly report that "questions are being raised by some" about what Blago's problems mean about the president-elect.

Your liberal press in action.

Breakthroughs in solar power

From Science Daily, here is an impressive new development in photovoltaic power.

Anna Dyson, an architectural scientist from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, is leading the way to make solar energy a real alternative to pollution-emitting fossil fuels. Her system contains rows of thin lenses that track the sun's movement. Sunlight floods each lens and is focused onto a postage-stamp sized, high-tech solar cell. Dyson says, "Really, what we want to do is be capturing and transferring that energy for usable means."
Conventional solar systems are about 14 percent efficient. This system has a combined heat and power efficiency of nearly 80 percent. "What they're doing is very efficiently capturing and transferring that light into electricity and the solar heat into hot water," Dyson explains.

Watching the video, I get the impression these are best suited to large-scale use - office buildings, malls, and such. They have a lot of moving parts, and they can't be cheap to make.

But there's been another breakthrough more likely to show up in your home: researchers are reporting record efficiencies for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). And although an efficiency of 10% doesn't sound very exciting compared to the 80% Dyson is claiming, or even the 14% achieved by conventional cells, it's a record for DSSCs, which have lots of other advantages. They're cheap to make, can be fashioned into flexible sheeting, and are tough enough to take on the elements without being encased in glass. They also work better in low-light environments. Until recently, these cells topped out at about 7% efficiency; they also degraded quickly with exposure to heat and UV light. The new cells are more stable at high temperatures and retain high output after long hours in direct sunlight.

AutoBlogGreen added to the blogroll

I've been reading AutoBlogGreen for months; I dunno why it hadn't occurred to me until now to add it to the Random Blogroll. The blog covers all things automotive that relate to the ecology - hybrids, PHEVs, biodiesel, hypermiling techniques, you name it. They cover all the major auto shows, and report on a lot of sponsored competitions (like the Automotive X-Prize); they feature many photo galleries of concept cars and new releases. And on Fridays they usually post something amusingly quirky. If you like cars and you care about the environment, enjoy!