Earth Hour 03.29.2008

Last night, 10781 Ackers Drive did its part to save the planet. Mark it.

Earth Hour is, according to Wikipedia, "an international event that asks households and businesses to turn off their lights and non-essential electrical appliances for one hour on the evening of 29 March at 8 pm local time until 9 pm to promote electricity conservation and thus lower carbon emissions." I only became aware of Earth Hour yesterday thanks to Google's efforts to promote the event.

Earth Hour was started in Australia, and it is promoted there by some environmentalist group and the Sydney Morning Herald. It was first held in 2007 and reduced the electricity consumption of Sydney by up to 10% for that hour. This year, over 300,000 people pledged support online and a number of cities agreed to partner up with the campaign. Partners in the US include Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Studio City, California, but a number of other cities agreed to support the effort. Looking at the list on Wikipedia, I can see more cities in North America than anywhere else got behind the effort, but Canada really carried the team because all 13 Canadian provinces and territories pledged support. I wonder what the provincial governments actually did though? What do they have the power to do? Do they call the mayors in the major cities and ask for support or can they turn the lights off themselves?

If Canada loves Mother Earth so much, maybe it should just marry her.

So, like I said, I only found out about Earth Hour yesterday while at work. I mentioned to Max and Daniela at lunch that we should save the Earth. There was some hostility right off the bat. We agreed to take a vote, as we never do in these situations, and the Earth squeaked out a victory, 2-1. The arguments were compelling on both sides, but in the end democracy lead us to the responsible decision.

It turns out that actually turning the lights out was hard. Max bought this house less than a year ago and he wasn't sure how to turn off the lights on the front of the building. There is a little piece of plastic out front, with the number of the house on it (otherwise you would never be able to tell these houses apart) and it contains a light bulb that comes on automatically at night. There are also two lamps that keep the driveway lit up. We had no idea how to turn any of these things off. There aren't any light switches. Max had an idea and it required something to stand on and a screwdriver. Inside the garage there is a metal plate with two wires that make up a circuit to SOMETHING in the house. Max took it apart and we lost one of the three external lights along with the doorbell.

The two lamps that keep the driveway bright proved too difficult to turn off. I guess that would make Earth Hour a failure for us, but we're ignoring that for now. The two lamps probably run on sensors (we didn't see them) and to turn them off we needed to unscrew them and take the bulbs out. It looked hard and we were already 3 minutes away from Earth Hour so we gave up and went back inside.

So with almost all the lights off, we played Clue by candlelight. Keeping the lights off is easy when you have boardgames and plenty of beer. Max brought out a candle he had that said "Africa" on one side of it. We all thought it was appropriate. It put out a powerful smell though and because Max was sitting next to it all night, he kept complaining that the house smelled like Africa.

I thought that maybe I could take some pictures of us with the candles and then send them into Google. Just to let Google know that it made a difference because they were the reason we were sitting in the dark in the first place. Then, this morning, when I checked online to see if Earth Hour was a success, I saw that San Francisco turned off the lights on the Golden Gate Bridge, Chicago turned off the lights inside of the Sears Tower, and Sydney turned off the juice to the Opera House and the Harbor Bridge. I doubt that we can compete with that for Google's attention. But since I already had the photos, I figured I could just blog about it. Viola.

Pot-lucks Rock

After a busy Saturday at the bakery, we had two consecutive days off: Easter Sunday and Monday. Saturday night we had visitors from Ashland, Oregon, and then hosted a pot-luck dinner on Easter Sunday.

Daniela's parents are currently renting a room to Gilberto, a student from Mexico. He's taking graduate school classes at Southern Oregon University in Ashland and Daniela and I met him back in February. He drove down with 4 friends from SOU: Tomoko from Japan, Vicky from Korea, David from Poland, and Loren from France. We were very international this weekend. They were adorable, showing up with a bottle of pear wine and a tort. Actually, they were the perfect guests, in that they didn't rob us or burn the house down.

On Easter Sunday Max invited over a bunch of his friends and we had a pot-luck dinner. I was going to make my world-famous quiche, but Max bought a bunch of marinated flank steak from a Mexican grocery store and we made tacos instead. It was a fairly muted affair: music in the background, plenty of food, booze, and conversation around the dining room table. Excluding our visitors from Ashland, there were 14 people here.

At one point someone broke out Catch Phrase and that provided some hilarity. One girl gave us the following clues: "It's... something travelers use..." and "the station guy uses it when he transports your luggage" for the clue, "Aircraft Carrier." That was awesome.

Pot-lucks rock because you get to meet your neighbors and they leave you all this awesome food for leftovers. I could see my friends in college taking their leftovers back with them, but 4 years later no one does that. To take your food home with you makes you look like a cheap ass. So we cleaned up. We hella cleaned up.

World War IV by Norman Podhoretz

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I'm currently studying for the Foreign Service Exam. I tried to register for it on February 27th (the final day of the registration period) and at this point, I'm pretty sure I was shut out of the March testing window. I haven't heard back from the State Department and I haven't emailed or called them to find out what happened to my application. Oh well. All the essays are written so I guess I'll just resubmit my application in June.

Part of my studying has been reading Foreign Affairs. It's an international relations journal that comes out 6 times a year and it's brilliant. The articles are great but I can also keep abreast of what's currently being published. According to the January/February issue, the current top-selling hardcover books on American foreign policy are The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, World War IV: The Struggle Against Islamofascism by Norman Podhoretz, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. "World War IV" caught my attention, so I drove out to the UNLV libraries and picked up a copy. As has been the case recently, I was the first person to check it out.

I hadn't heard of Norman Podhoretz before, but he was editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995, a "leftist commentator" in the 60's, and more recently associated with the Neo-Conservative movement. He was also Rudy Giuliani's senior foreign policy advisor during his presidential bid. He supports the war in Iraq and thinks attacking Iran is a good idea. Here is the lovable scamp in a recent photo:


He's not Ron Paul adorable, but he does look snappy in a blazer.

So, welcome to World War IV. It's been going on for quite some time but only after 9/11 did we figure it out. If you're kicking yourself because you missed World War III, it's just the Cold War by another name. It was a 42-year-long world war and it wasn't without its battlefields. The Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Korea were all just battles in a much larger war. Which, I think, is a fair assessment (at least in trying to understand the US' motivation).

World War IV is being fought against Islamo-fascism. The governments of the Muslim world are the true heirs to Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union. In fact, Mr. Podhoretz draws a line connecting Nazi Germany, the USSR, and Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government in Iraq. The Nazis defeated France in World War II. The French Vichy government cooperated with the Nazis, and through that cooperation the Nazis had a hand in the French colonial governments of the Middle East. They taught those colonial governments fascism, and after World War II, the USSR picked up where the Nazis left off, thanks to their close relations with the region. The Nazis are sort of to blame for what we're seeing in the Middle East today. NAZIs! That's easy to understand, right? Everyone hates those guys. So that's who we're fighting today. Nazis. And Communists. And Muslims.

Podhoretz feels that we have only emboldened the terrorists by not confronting them directly. You can blame George Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Gerald Ford, Nixon, and especially Jimmy Carter for that. They kept passing the buck and thanks to that the terrorists have only become stronger. For example, when George Bush Sr. invaded Iraq in 1990, he pulled out before reaching Baghdad and so only defended the status quo. In the large number of terrorist attacks on American bases and embassies abroad in the past 20 years, we have failed to adequately respond and this has further emboldened the terrorists. And by the way, thank G-d George Bush was elected when he was because he has the courage and gusto to fight this war and call it what it is (ahem).

World War IV isn't going to end anytime soon and if you think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as two small battlefields in a much larger war against fascist governments in the Muslim world then the decision to invade Iraq makes more sense. Podhoretz (like George W. Bush?) thinks invading Iran is a good idea and while we may not be invading Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, or Pakistan any time soon, they are all important to the larger war against Islamofascism. The Cold War had many important regions too, but they didn't all turn into shooting wars.

What I found most interesting in reading Mr. Podhoretz's book was that he feels the nature of the world war has changed. There may not be another world war that resembles World War I. In the way that World War II didn't look like the static trench warfare and gas attacks of World War I, World War III didn't resemble World War II either. And it's changed again in the current situation. If you think World War IV is a bad title, then you don't understand how the nature of world wars has changed, because another world war is exactly what this is.

I guess where I disagree with Mr. Podhoretz is where he tries to lump so many different countries and situations into one large struggle. I don't think you can necessarily call the Vietnam War one part of the war against the USSR. I mean, maybe that's how the US viewed it at the time, but was that a correct assessment? We lost that battle but not the war, right? What did the Communists do when they won? Didn't Ho Chi Minh and the Communists of the north view the war against the US as a struggle for independence and less as an ideological struggle against Capitalism? Did we need to fight that war and what really turned out to be at stake? Didn't it just hurt the US in the long run because it generated so many bad feelings at home and abroad against all the things that the US claims it stands for? What have we won by fighting the war in Iraq? Even if we eliminate all the Islamofascist governments in the world, who's to say we can eliminate terrorism directed against the US? Wasn't Timothy McVeigh living in a free and democratic country when he blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City? Wasn't his reason for doing so that the government killed all those people at Waco and Ruby Ridge? Aren't we creating the situation we're in by having 600 military bases all over the world and putting our noses in the affairs of others? Wasn't Osama bin Laden's main grievance against the US not our support for Israel but our bases in Saudi Arabia? What are we trying to accomplish: making ourselves free from terrorist attacks or trying to convert the entire world to free-market democracies? Is the latter the best way to avoid the former?

Lastly, I love that when I searched for "World War IV" in Google, this picture came up.

Technorati tags: Norman Podhoretz, World War IV, Foreign Service, Islamofascism

Robbed! For reals!

Last night someone broke into the bakery and stole the plasma screen TVs. There were two at the bakery on Richmar and S. Eastern, and they were installed because Joni and Curt wanted to create a loop of all of the bakery's appearances on the Food Network. Anyway, they never got around to it, and now they never will because someone took the TVs. Max and I were the first ones to the bakery this morning and I was the first person to see what had happened. When I came into the showcase area, the first thing I noticed was that this black metal rack had been knocked over and bread was scattered on the floor. I thought that it must have taken a pretty irresponsible person the night before to knock that over and NOT pick it back up. Then I saw that there was broken glass on the far side of the room and that one of the windows had been boarded up with plywood. My brain still wasn't making the connection at that point. I noticed next that the register drawer was open and the flat screen monitor that sits over it was missing. I started to panic a little bit. Neurons in my brain were firing and I was making the connection. I looked around at the glass cases and everything seemed to be there, but when I remembered what the most valuable things in the room were, I was not surprised to see them gone. Both TVs had been torn off the wall with their electrical cords spewing out of the walls like shiny metal intestines.

Max and I put the pieces together but we couldn't figure out why the window had already been boarded up. Did the guys who steal the TVs do that? We thought maybe Joni already knew about it and there was some sort of clean-up effort made the night before after we had left and went home. Max called Joni first to tell her what had happened. The next call was to the police so we could file a report. After the police had been called Max walked around to the front of the store and found a little white piece of paper that explained the window. It was left by the police the night before. They had arrived on the scene, found the window smashed, and tried to call the owner (we still don't know who they called and how they failed to get a hold of Joni). When they were unable to talk to Joni, they boarded the window up and left.

It's a shitty situation but it happens I guess. Joni's husband Curt is pretty pissed off. Joni seemed to take it well and I saw her laughing at something only a few hours after she had found out. Needless to say that the TVs won't be replaced.

We heard from a neighbor (someone was working the graveyard shift at Carl's Jr.) that 2 cars had pulled up to the building late the night before. There were at least 5 people involved. Two of them went out back by the dumpsters to watch the alley behind the store. Then three other people smashed the window in and took the TVs. The alarm must have gone off, and the guys must have been rushing because they neglected to take a laptop that was out on a counter right next to one of the TVs. They went into the register but only found some change. The bills are always removed the night before, obviously. The only things that seemed to be missing were the TVs.

Two things that we thought about later were the following: once the guys broke into the store through the window, they didn't open the doors up to get the TVs out. They took the TVs and then climbed through the same window they came in through. That wasn't very smart. The doors could have been easily opened up from the inside and they wouldn't have had to step over the metal bar that separated the window into two parts. Also, we assumed that they didn't fuck with any of the pastries. We would probably know by now if someone got sick, but it would have been pretty easy to put something in the food. That seems unlikely though. They didn't maliciously break anything else in the store. They just grabbed the TVs, checked the register, and knocked over a few things in the process.

Anywho, that made today an exciting day. And the bakery closes at 4pm on Sunday! That's like a half-day as far as I'm concerned!

The person working the graveyard shift at Carl's Jr. has been very helpful, and thanks to his/her information, the police are now looking for these two guys, believed to be working with the thieves: