Fasten your seatbelts, I’m going to mention three completely seperate topics in one post. I start with a challenge to you all. For how long can you watch this clip of “The View” before you have to stop.
So my question to you is: Why is this on TV? I mean, Rush Limbaugh is an idiot but watching this blabber is pretty unbearable. Unless, of course, you interpret it as comedy.
Second, I’ll share with you this TPM “day in 100 seconds” clip. A lot happened today but sometimes it seems like you can grasp what the media had to say in only 100 seconds…
Lastly, I’ll leave you with this picture I snapped when I was in New York over winter break. I thought it was somewhat ironic… here is Coca-Cola promoting alternative energy with a giant electronic billboard. I mean, I understand that it runs on wind-power (which, actually I think is very cool), but couldn’t they have promoted alternative energy in a less wasteful way? Why not throw up a giant Coca-Cola logo made out of real plants! That would be something. I know, I know, I’m sort of hating on the wrong folks–at least they are making an effort. But I think we need to be skeptical of this sort of thing. I’ve said before that there is going to be a huge need for oversight in regards to “green” products and advertising. Who is holding companies accountable for labeling their products environmentally friendly? Who checked to make sure that Coca-Cola ad is actually run by wind-power? There are some people in charge of these things… but I’m guessing we could use a whole lot more–now that “green” is really catching on.
P.S: Check out the awesome back-and-forth comments going on in response to my “Simple Math” post. And, I’ll be giving out another T-shirt soon! Start commenting, you could win!
4 Comments
February 5, 2009 at 6:54 pm
What I think is interesting in Limbaugh’s case is that he hates “liberals” primarily because he disagrees with them. So…he hates this stimulus plan because he doesn’t think it will work. Therefore, if he’s right, the stimulus will fail but if he’s wrong it’ll succeed.
If he’s encouraging the republicans to vote against what he thinks will be a failing stimulus, then he’s actually helping Obama…
Am I making any sense?
February 16, 2009 at 7:44 pm
I really like your last point Phil, about the “green” wave that is sweeping the country. When I first started seeing commercials that advertised products on the grounds that they were green, I naively thought to myself “Yeah, great! Finally!” My roommate brought me back to reality though, by angrily denouncing every commercial he saw that sold a product that claimed to be green.
I think sometimes he’s unreasonable with the extent to which he despises it, because at LEAST the idea is out there. That’s better than before, right? But he and you Phil are definitely right in saying that there needs to be oversight up the wazoo on this stuff. I’d be willing to bet that Coca-Cola sign is NOT powered by wind energy. Or maybe partly. Which again, is better than nothing! But the point it is, people can easily claim to be doing something that they’re not really doing, and with the environmental crisis as bad as it seems to be, we can’t really afford to have that going on.
February 24, 2009 at 1:17 am
another thing with going “green” is in new building design. people want to make “green” buildings that are LEED accredited (if you know anything about engineering or city planning you’ll know what I’m talking about) The problem with LEED is that, yeah you may get a building that requires a lot less energy to run and may plug some energy back into the grid, which is great. BUT, these building projects, which are probably going to be part of the stimulus package, claim to create jobs. The only things that change with LEED accredited projects is that the engineer in charge has to be LEED certified and the project ends up costing a lot more to build. The same companies are involved and they would have other building projects to work on if not for green design. They in fact create zero jobs. At this point in the economy I feel that jobs are more important than green buildings. There are other ways we can be green but lets not confuse people into thinking we’re creating jobs when we only end up paying engineers more money to do the same thing.
April 1, 2009 at 4:23 pm
I won’t even comment on The View…I will however comment on the Coca-Cola energy display. Coca-Cola is a ridiculous company and I am fairly disgusted that they would use a ploy like that for “green energy.” Did they happen to mention what the material the display is made of came from? Perhaps if the company harnassed the energy from the H2O used at its many plants, it could be self-sustaining. (Actually, that’s not a perhaps…it’s already being done by other manufacturing plants) I don’t know how much energy it requires to run an electronic billboard, but I’m willing to bet that a flood light on a recycled paper billboard would waste less.