Day 1040: WALL-E
July 2, 2008 - Filed Under culture-society-history, environment, movies/tv
What did you think the right would say about Pixar’s WALL-E?
I’ll never understand why resource parsimony cannot be a tenet of conservatism. It’s ok to mine the earth, create waste and expend energy as long as we do it in moderation. If we want ourselves and our children to live long, healthy lives with a respect for the fact that the earth is limited in what it can make and handle and that the waste has to go somewhere on this planet, why is this then an evil, liberal agenda and not a human agenda? Waste bothers me (even and especially when I create it) because I measure capitalism in efficiency and waste is not efficient. If the point is to make money now, irreducible excess and the future be damned, it will come to bite you in the butt in this lifetime, in the form of increasing pollution, crime and disease and decreasing health and quality of life. What’s the roadblock to comprehension here?
It all became clear to me on reading this post at the Culture War Blog. You see, eco-friendly movies will cause mindless drones like us to put environment over humanity which will then lead to “the devaluing of human life and the worship of creation rather than the Creator.” Yeah, ok then. Let’s just ignore that crucial fact that the environment includes humans and ruining ourselves makes us a sad lot of worshippers of the Creator. “I’ll go further and bet you a hundred bucks” that logic wasn’t the aim here.
Moving along. Despite that he dislikes the movie for its eco-friendly theme and will not purchase WALL-E products specifically and not Disney junk in its entirety, Greg Pollowitz over at National Review makes a good point.
All this from mega-company Disney, who wants us to buy WALL-E kitsch for our kids that are manufactured in China at environment-destroying factories and packed in plastic that will take hundreds of year to biodegrade in our landfills.
And so it goes.
* SPOILERS AHEAD *
The movie had me at Hello, Dolly! As dear, departed friend, computer artist and the best professor ever, George Cramer, always said, “Animation without a compelling story is a waste of pixels.” All the way from the rendering of grit and Soderbergh-esque lighting of WALL-E’s earth to the robot’s expressions, from the boundless wonder that WALL-E was allowed to express by his creators to his dance in the ether with Eva, the film was joyous and full of awe, reflecting WALL-E’s innocence and kind nature. I admit doubts. The kitschy, anthropomorphic love affair between two robots troubled me through a large part of the film until I realized that, 700 years in the future, artificial intelligence can be as intelligent and expressive as it wants to be. If HAL is a murderous paranoiac in a projected 2001, why not a robot who dances with a hubcap as a hat and who seeks true love in 2708?
Go watch WALL-E. The film succeeded in making me uncomfortable about how much junk we collect and dump out over the course of a lifetime, but also did not force me to disavow all plastic, shun my car and not get Chinese food in to-go containers after the final credits rolled. Just go watch the film for what it is.
Day 1040: The Force Is Strong In This One
July 2, 2008 - Filed Under funny
Giraffe gathers troops, leads great escape from circus
Fifteen camels, several llamas and a potbellied pig broke out of a circus near Amsterdam on Monday. The ringleader? A giraffe who bolted, too.
They wanted to see the .. uhhh … sights of Amsterdam. Curses, foiled again!
Officers and circus employees rounded them up before they could get too far and returned them to their pens.
Day 1040: New Orleans Keeping Up With
July 2, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, crime, new orleans, recovery
So, how’s rooting folks out of their FEMA trailers coming?
Day 1039: Transparency, But Not The Good Kind
July 1, 2008 - Filed Under We Are Not Ok, government, new orleans, recovery
I was almost ready to gloss over Karen’s and E’s posts on the increasing likelihood of wrongdoings on the part of New Orleans Affordable Housing, Inc. and to chalk it up to just another carefully-placed hole in the New Orleans treasury. Everyone and their dog has been robbing New Orleans blind and for decades, so what is another 2 to 4 million dollars?
It matters because these houses were remediated using Community Development Block Grants a.k.a. your tax money and mine and … wait for it … are going to be demolished using FEMA funds anyway. Furthermore, forget the money, it is really important because these are homes of the elderly and disabled, these poor people were duped into believing their homes are alright and THEY ARE GOING TO BE DEMOLISHED. It is clear that the list that NOAH generated was never cross-referenced with the City’s Imminent Health Threat list. (And God alone knows who controls that list and how.)
And then Karen posted about a house on Willow St., a property that is a) owned by Orleans Metropolitan Housing, b) being remediated by NOAH, c) should be on the City’s IHT list and d) isn’t. NOAH’s mission is ”to develop, promote and administer housing initiatives, economic development programs, youth enhancement and senior services on behalf of the city of New Orleans via the Office of Planning and Development.” Orleans Metropolitan Housing doesn’t sound like Grandma Betsy to me so what’s NOAH doing remediating that property?
Karen provides us with a convenient reminder - a T-P article from May 2006 - which details the exploits of my former Councilwoman, Rene “God Sent Me That Dodge Durango” Gill-Pratt, her special friend and head of Orleans Metropolitan Housing, Mose Jefferson, and Jefferson’s family in and around real-estate dealings involving Orleans Metropolitan Housing and Care Unlimited. While Mose Jefferson, his sister and her daughter have been indicted recently “for allegedly skimming hundreds of thousands of dollars from non-profit groups they controlled,” it appears this network is quite pervasive. Where does it stop?
Reading again the last page of the 2006 T-P article, I found that
Care Unlimited’s mission, according to agreements the group signed when it accepted the cars from the city, is to “provide minor repairs to homes of senior citizens who could not afford the expense of repairing their homes”
with a forthcoming grant at the time to
“focus on pre-employment readiness skills.”
Funny then that, in the very next paragraph, Orleans Metropolitan Housing’s mission is
to perform minor repairs to homes - “renovation and weatherproofing, windows and doors … some cleanups of lots, painting.”
And funnier still when you compare these to NOAH’s varied mission.
… to develop, promote and administer housing initiatives, economic development programs, youth enhancement and senior services on behalf of the city of New Orleans … newly constructed homes, housing rehabilitation projects, homeownership opportunities, home maintenance, job training and development and the development of safe, decent, affordable rental units … the exterior of the home is painted with minor repair to weatherboard, fascia and soffit replacement … assist owner0occupied homeowners with the replacement or repair of roofs.
Cut and paste much?
You can see right through all of this, not that they wanted you to or care that you can.
Update: The Gambit catches wind of NOAH’s Lark.
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