Good News and the Flag June 30, 2006January 15, 2017 THE GOOD NEWS Don’t fail to see the movie because you think it will be a downer. With a bit of luck, this story can all have a happy ending. Remember the disappearing ozone layer? In the interest of spraying our underarms to smell nice (and cooling our refrigerators with Freon), man-made chlorofluorocarbons were being released into the atmosphere, eating up the ozone layer. But the planet got together, changed its behavior, and – do you know what? – the ozone layer is okay again. The current problem is worse, but it, too, can probably be solved – with a load of jobs and wealth created in the process – if we put our minds to it. Think, people – think! See this movie. Take your kids and your co-workers. Call the principal of your kids’ school and invite him or her to come with you. If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it? Well, they have. THE FLAG Wednesday, I wrote a blessedly short column on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to ban flag-burning. (‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ it began. ‘The whole point of America is that you can burn the flag.’) Joe C: ‘As a former Marine Corps infantry officer (1995-1999), I was initially surprised to find out just how many servicemen and servicewomen – including me – feel just as you do. I must have read today’s column five times. Each time the lump in my throat only grew.’ Esteban: ‘The Republicans say that the activist judges changed the will of 48 states … they do not want to understand that we have three branches of Government, and that Congress focuses mostly on what the majority wants (so that politicians can get re-elected by that majority), while the Courts are there, in part, to protect the rights of the minority.’ Richard: ‘Any government agency that tries to prosecute a flag burning case could be wide open for huge law suits for the following reason. It will be very easy to manufacture flags specifically for burning that have red and white stripes with a blue field containing white stars. However, there might be more or fewer stripes or stars than the official flag making it not an American flag at all. Therefore, any prosecution for flag burning would be malicious prosecution, abuse of process, or whatever the proper legal term is. Anyone who wishes to protest could also punish the government by documenting what they are burning in advance. In fact, prosecution would become impossible after a few such cases if the burner is just careful to be sure the flag is completely consumed. That would leave no evidence that an actual American flag had been burned. Surely, prosecutors would not be willing to take on such cases after some big awards in countersuits, besides which they could not prove their case without evidence. Unless a prosecution witness had confirmed from close examination immediately prior to the fire that the flag burned was an official flag, surely the defense claim that it was not would have to prevail lacking any other constitutional changes made to alter rules of evidence or presumption of innocence.’ ☞ Hmmm. Not sure juries or judges would find in Richard’s favor – or for the flag makers. (Might making a fake flag for purposes of desecration not itself count as desecration?) But why are we even talking about this? This is America. We want people to love and respect her flag not because we have a law requiring them to (at home), or because we can bomb their poverty-stricken country into oblivion, but because of our traditions of free expression, compassion, inclusion, ingenuity, opportunity, energy, and idealism. Have a great July 4th weekend. At our house, Charles and I will have American flags flying everywhere.
Kathi Sees the Movie (and One of My readers Is an Idiot) June 29, 2006March 4, 2017 It gets scarier and scarier. Wait til you see how the Senate is attacking the scientific community and risking our future. But let’s ease into it this way: Kathi Derevan: ‘We finally went to see An Inconvenient Truth last night. Now, may I say, I was going more out of duty than desire. I just couldn’t imagine it was going to be more than a lecture, and maybe a dry one at that. Wow. I am going to try to get everyone I know and everyone they know to see it. Amazing.’ And now let’s ratchet it up: Roger in Calgary: ‘The scientific community is NOT of one mind as you insist. Please go here or here. The movie is rife with distortions and falsehoods. I consider you to be fair-minded but on this issue, you are completely closed-minded.’ ☞ First off, can we avoid use of words like ‘distortion’ and ‘falsehood’? Unless you think Gore and the rest of the scientific community are on some sort of evil mission to save civilization, shouldn’t you use words like ‘unsupported conclusions and inaccuracies’ to describe what you think the film is guilty of? But see, here’s the thing: It’s not like the space shuttle, where every last detail needs to be perfect or you shouldn’t launch. Even if there are scientists who question some of this – as until recently there were scientists who questioned any causal connection between smoking and cancer – do we really need every single scientist in the world to agree with every single word of the movie before we see the bigger picture and take action? That question holds even if there are truly independent scientists who have reached the same conclusions as those that Exxon, et al, have funded (in the grand scientific tradition of the Tobacco Institute before them). Here’s what the Associated Press found when it surveyed climatologists: The nation’s top climate scientists are giving “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy. The former vice president’s movie – replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets – mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press. . . . The tiny errors scientists found weren’t a big deal, “far, far fewer and less significant than the shortcoming in speeches by the typical politician explaining an issue,” said Michael MacCracken, who used to be in charge of the nation’s global warming effects program and is now chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington. But now here’s where it gets really scary: The Republican Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works has vehemently attacked the AP for this report, demanding, for example, that AP list all 19 scientists it talked to, not just the five it quoted. I don’t suppose AP would mind doing this, and may already have done so. (Would that we could say the same for the secret list of participants in Dick Cheney’s secret 2001 energy task force – the list that even a GAO lawsuit could not pry loose for public inspection.) But what an astonishing position for the Republican Majority on this committee to take! The headline of their press release: AP INCORRECTLY CLAIMS SCIENTISTS PRAISE GORE’S MOVIE. Doesn’t that suggest to the casual reader that scientists don’t praise his movie? Yet they all but unanimously do. (Bear in mind, the oil industry controls the executive branch of our government – run by two former oil men – and wields huge influence on the Republican Congress. Hence it’s just possible the AP is more objective about this than the Republican Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.) So how does the Committee justify its headline? They have a professor from James Cook University in Australia calling Gore’s arguments “so weak they are pathetic.” Which I guess should put the lie to the notion that 6.5 billion humans burning hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline and lord knows how much coal into the air each year could have any effect. And they have this wonderful disclosure: Gore’s film … cites a review of scientific literature by the journal Science which claimed 100% consensus on global warming, but [MIT Professor Richard] Lindzenpointed out the study was flat out incorrect. “A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words “global climate change” produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it,” Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal. See? Gore cites an article in Science that said 928 peer-reviewed articles had abstracts when only 913 did – barely 98.3% of them! Worse, according to this, “several” of those 913 (four? six?) actually disagreed with the consensus view. So Gore claimed her study found that “none” of the 928 peer-reviewed articles disagreed with the consensus (which it did) when really, if Lindzen has this right (he gets Naomi Oreskes’s name wrong; it is Naomi, not Nancy), her study should have said “almost none.” If none of the 928 disagrees, maybe it’s worth taking seriously. But if almost none disagrees, well, then, that’s enough doubt for the Wall Street Journal . . . for Exxon . . . for the Republican majority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee . . . and for our President – who has shown no more interest in seeing this film than he showed in the explicit CIA warning he received at Blair House on January 7, 2001, shortly before taking office, of a “tremendous,” “immediate” threat from Osama Bin Laden. He ignored both, each time focusing on Iraq instead. Folks: the human ecosphere is in serious trouble. And the guys running the show are straight from the mold of the Tobacco Institute. Only more powerful. There is an idiot who reads this web site who is convinced I am “ashamed to tell the truth” and will not post the link to that Senate Republican Majority Report. (Sportsmanship inhibits me from publishing even his first name; but he knows who he is.) And there is a very bright guy named Gennady, who has read the Wall Street Journal column quoted in the Senate press release and writes to say that he won’t, therefore, go see the movie. Tobacco guys see no link between smoking and cancer? That’s good enough for him. And I tell you: Go see this movie! Read Naomi (not Nancy) Oreskes’s article in Science! And if having done that you remain certain the world need not take action, so be it. But my guess is that you will decide that the Republicans working so hard to debunk this movie are doing you and your kids grave harm. Tomorrow: The Good News – and Your Thoughts on Flag Burning
Flag Burning June 28, 2006March 25, 2012 Oh, for crying out loud. The whole point of America is that you can burn the flag. Nothing sums up her greatness so succinctly. And it is precisely this – that in America you should be free to do any damn thing you please so long as it does not impinge on the rights of others – that leads most of us to abhor the idea of burning it in the first place. And one thing you should absolutely be free to do in America is criticize your country and express outrage at its behavior – even if you’re wrong. We call that the Bill of Rights.
The Irony of the 1% Doctrine June 27, 2006March 4, 2017 THE IRONY OF THE 1% DOCTRINE This book by Ron Suskind will surely be #1 on the best-seller lists. The 1% Doctrine holds that if there is even the slightest – one-percent – chance a terror threat may be real, America will take action as if it’s a 100% certainty. The implications of that – and of our not having known it was our nation’s policy – seem to me to be huge. But for the sake of argument, let’s just buy it for a minute. (And then read the book and spend many hours debating it with everyone we know, because what debate could be more important?) The irony is that when it comes to terror threats, the Administration has decided that a 1% chance is enough to impel decisive action. But when it comes to the global climate change that could wipe out most of the world’s coastal cities and threaten civilization itself, even near certainty is not enough to provoke action. If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it? Well, they have. BOREF Joey: ‘I bought more BOREF at 9 today. Is this the end?’ ☞ Me, too. I doubt it’s the end. More likely, if things go badly, it will be years before Borealis completely peters out. When we started with all this, the stock was $3.50 or so and – with 5 million shares outstanding – the whole thing was valued at $17.5 million. It had a lot of wildly grandiose claims and projections (wasn’t it supposed to be making $1 billion in profit by now, or some such?), but who knew what else. Progress has been maddeningly slow, and there is still the real chance we could lose all our money; but the stock price does not necessarily reflect the odds. In the short term, the stock price represents the intersection of impatience and greed – impatience on the part of whoever sold a few shares the last few days at $9 (having perhaps bought them at their all time high of $21 a year or so ago); greed on the part of whoever bought those shares (well, Joey and me, for example). Consider that Borealis owns about 5 million shares of Roche Bay, Ltd., the Arctic iron ore speculation. Since Borealis is divided into 5 million shares itself, each Borealis share in effect represents, among other things, one Roche Bay share. And Roche Bay was also trading at $9 or so yesterday. See where I’m headed? If Roche Bay shares are actually worth $9 – a big if – a buyer of Borealis at $9 a share got, for his money, $9 worth of Roche Bay – and the rest of Borealis for ‘free.’ Of course, it’s possible all Borealis subsidiaries will ultimately prove worthless, and the parent company with it. But you have a savvy British money manager investing a few million dollars to do preliminary testing on what may be a gigantic commercially exploitable iron ore deposit on the Atlantic coast of Canada . . . and you have a significant British steel company agreeing to buy 20 million tons of ore if it does prove to be commercially viable. So that’s one reason to hang on for a few years. And you’ve got the electric motor that drove the 767 around the tarmac like a golf cart, with all the potential implications endlessly discussed here over the past year. Will any of this ever pan out? Nobody knows. But . . . sometimes . . . patience pays off. A long time ago, a real estate fiend of my folks told me about a company called Tejon Ranch (TRC). They owned a gigantic piece of property on Interstate 5, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The stock was $20 a share, which worked out to $60 an acre. Something crazy like that. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was pretty easy to figure out – just multiply the stock price by the number of shares and divide that by 270,000 acres. And for the several years I owned it, I would do that calculation frequently. Shouldn’t that land one day be worth a lot more? For years, the stock didn’t budge. But then one day it began what I recall as a rapid quintuple. Thirty years later, the company is valued at $2,460 an acre. So in this case, the potential turned out to be real. But people are not keen on waiting. Or take Texas Pacific Land Trust (TPL). It owns a lot of land in West Texas. The stock was $14 in 1993. Today: $148. The point isn’t that any stock you hold a long time will rise sharply in value. Clearly not. The point is just that where patience is required, investors sometimes show little interest. And therein – sometimes – lies an opportunity. To me, BOREF at $9, down from the mid-teens a while back, doesn’t signal the end; it signals a (highly speculative) opportunity.
A You-Tube, Two Stocks, and a Movie June 26, 2006January 15, 2017 Friday we had whales. Today, if you have broadband – monkeys. Highly evolved. (Thanks, Andy Shore.) FMD Suggested here at $38.10 in March, it closed Friday at $56.48. Then again, LEA, suggested last November at $28, closed at $22.74. I am holding both, albeit more of the former than the latter. If you bought them with money you can afford to lose, you should consider holding them also. (If you bought them with money you can’t afford to lose, you’ve been a bad reader. Bad reader. Bad.) If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it? Well, they have.
Listen to the Poets of the Ocean June 23, 2006March 4, 2017 Don’t tell me you can read these snippets without wanting to read the whole thing: . . . humpback whales seem to be using rhyme as a way to help them remember what comes next in their complex songs. Troubadours used the same trick: they put rhymes into the epic poems they memorized because it helped them remember them. . . . the loudest, lowest sounds that whales make can carry across oceans . . . Listening through Navy hydrophones located off the Virginia coast, Chris Clark found that he could hear the lowest notes in the songs of humpback whales that were singing as they migrated out of the Norwegian sea into the Atlantic, thousands of kilometers away. . . . every ocean basin has a unique song that all the humpback whales that live there sing . . . . . . And now Japan is going to kill Humpback whales – the singer/composer/poets – a species the rest of the world values and protects – a species whose songs inspired the world to avoid the catastrophe of the mass extinction of whales. . . . . . . I have put one of the great 1970s songs of the Bermuda Humpback master singers on this website: and have arranged with the company that markets it (Living Music Records), to let you download it free. . . ☞ Dr. Roger Payne has been studying whales for 39 years. You read his open letter . . . and you think back to that day, aged 13, when you dropped a single grain of salt into the pond water under your microscope and watched its teeming life stop dead . . . you see Al Gore’s movie . . . and you consider that there are six times as many of us as there were a century and a half ago, living, on average, perhaps (just guessing here) 20 times heavier on the land – so 120 times the daily impact – and you wonder how the next 1,000 generations (for whom we hold it in care) will fare on our miraculous but fragile planet.
Merger! June 22, 2006March 4, 2017 On April 26, I told you this (skip all but the bold face): Here’s an interesting speculation I do not recommend. I’ve bought some myself, but that’s me. I can’t help myself sometimes. If you buy it and lose, I could never forgive myself. But let me back up. Remember how, in the days of the South Sea Bubble, people were raising money for all manner of ocean-faring expeditions? No? Well, this was the early Eighteenth Century, so even I would have been too young to remember it clearly. (Where is Strom Thurmond when you need him?) But it happened. And one of the ventures was famously undertaken for an enterprise the specifics of which ‘could not be revealed’ – yet found funding anyway. Well, today, apparently, accomplished financiers are raising money for SPAC’s – Single Purpose Acquisition Companies – and, although it is a small and arcane field about which I know very little (where is due diligence when you need it?), I am told it works this way, or at least did in the case of Aldabra Acquisition Corporation: The company is formed by someone with a reputation for being good at this, and raises a bunch of money to make an acquisition – just what acquisition that might be remaining to be seen. In return for their cash, investors get stock and warrants and the promise (if I’ve got this right) that if no acquisition is made within 18 months – the first dozen of which have now passed – yes, their warrants to buy more stock will expire worthless, but they will get their original cash returned to them. So their main risk is losing the use of the cash for eighteen months . . . while, if the acquisition does get done and proves savvy, well, happy days are here again. And what some of the initial investors do, apparently, is sell the warrants in the public market, so that, even if no acquisition is made, they make an immediate 12% or so on their investment, 100% of which is then returned 18 months later. Not so terrible. And if an acquisition is made, their stock itself may rise smartly. They win small or they win big, but they win. So yesterday I bought a bunch of the warrants – ALBAW.OB is the symbol – at 70 cents each, and in an aggregate amount I can afford to lose. I’ve done no research on this except to know that someone smarter than me will lose three times as much if this doesn’t work (famous last words, by the way) . . . and that the people behind all this will lose a million or two in expenses if they don’t wind up concluding an acquisition before the clock runs out. In that sorry case, my 70 cents per warrant is gone. Game over. The gamble is that they will do a deal, and that the warrants will rise smartly when they do. At which point one could either sell them for a short-term capital gain or exercise them and hold the underlying stock in hope of a lightly-taxed long-term capital gain sometime later. That’s it. ‘Ah,’ you’re thinking. ‘It has come to this.’ Well, yes it has: there is a limit to the number of times I can tell you to pay off your credit cards, quit smoking, and buy fuel efficient cars. The occasional SPAC spec adds zest. It is the piquant sauce on an Antoine’s oyster. Well, yesterday they did do a deal – ‘Aldabra Acquisition Corporation to Merge with Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Corporation’ – so that part of the gamble worked out just fine. But the stock and the warrants went down (the warrants are now around 38 cents), which was not how this was supposed to work. You see how hard it is to be greedy? I try so hard to get rich without effort, yet am thwarted at every turn. ‘Great Lakes is the largest provider of dredging services in the United States.’ What the Aldabra people may have missed in selecting this acquisition is that, with the oceans rising (have you seen the movie?), dredging will no longer be required. Why didn’t they merge with Great Lakes Pontoon and Life Raft instead? (I’m not selling.)
Light Summer Reading Thou Shalt Not . . . Something June 21, 2006March 4, 2017 IT’S ALMOST TOO EASY But you have to watch this brief interview of Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R., GA). Have a nice long day. Happy summer!
Create Your Own June 20, 2006January 15, 2017 TONY SNOW SAYS SOMETHING REALLY, REALLY STUPID Thus spake Tony Snow, as reported in yesterday’s New York Times: ‘The president understands people’s impatience – not impatience but how a war can wear on a nation,’ Mr. Snow said on the CNN program ‘Late Edition.’ ‘He understands that. If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.’ Yeah, Tony. ‘Hitler, Schmitler’ was the general attitude back then. Less than five months before the German surrender, few Americans believed in the war and most were wondering, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ Or wait. It was exactly the opposite. I do think that if, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, we had invaded Iraq, people might well have wondered, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ But back then, we struck back at the countries that were striking us and our allies. Of the 19 hijackers, 15 were Saudi, none was Iraqi, and Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Yet we rushed to invade Iraq without adequate planning or strength, at disastrous cost to our nation – and, yes, Tony, people are wondering, ‘Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?’ CREATE YOUR OWN $15 MILLION MASTERPIECE Kathryn Lance: ‘Check this one out! Play around with your mouse, see what happens when you left-click, and right-click for more options.’ CREATE YOUR OWN DUST STORM Stephen Gilbert: ‘I hate to mention this, but there was an NPR report the other day on our western deserts. It appears that there are microscopic plants that grow in the deserts that bind the soil and prevent dust storms. Cattle and off-road vehicles destroy these plants. The wind blows and voila: more dust storms than before.’ CREATE YOUR OWN TREE Sergei Slobodov: ‘Just to make it clear: According to the Quantum Mechanics, if a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it fall, not only there was no sound, there was no tree.’ ☞ Now THAT makes sense. TXCO We first considered this stock in 2004, at $4.50. We sold most of it at various prices between $6.50 and $11. I bought more yesterday at $9.05. It’s a small speculative domestic oil producer, but not as speculative as it once was – and not as widely followed as the big guys. All the usual cautions apply (really!), but I could see it at $20 in two or three years. NOT JUST ROGER EBERT Neal Roach: ‘David Denby, in last week’s New Yorker: ‘Every school, college, and church group, and everyone else beyond the sway of General Motors, ExxonMobil, and the White House should see this movie, and, with luck, they will.’ ‘
Caffeine-Free Diet Coke? Are You Kidding? June 19, 2006March 4, 2017 But first . . . NEW ORLEANS Charles and I went to see Harry Connick, Jr. in one of five final benefit performances of ‘The Pajama Game.’ It was as good in 2006 as it was in 1954. Better! You should hear Harry Connick, Jr. play the piano. (I didn’t see it in 1954 but my parents brought home the original cast recording and I could soon multiply anything by seven and a half cents.) The benefits were for three charities, one of which is the The New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village. At the end of our performance – ‘I . . . can hardly wait / to wake and get / to work at eight / NOTHING’s quite like the pa . . . / ja . . . ma . . . game’ – after a long standing ovation, Harry came back out on stage to auction off a limited edition Longines watch, retail value $9,000, which had gone the night before for $17,500 [note to the winner, if he happens to be a reader of this column: you can only deduct the $8,500 by which your donation exceeded the retail value, so it’s best just to give it to another charity and buy a $45 Swatch] and he said that if our audience beat that mark, he’d treat us to some great down home New Orleans jazz. So the bidding started at $1,000 and settled at $36,000 (sold to a New York financier whose grandfather had grown up in New Orleans) and we got to hear some great down home jazz. The $36,000 was enough to build about half a house in New Orleans. Harry Connick, Jr’s project has already built more than 30. Meanwhile, plans have been announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development – HUD – to tear down 5,000 units of New Orleans public housing. According to this article: . . . HUD’s demolition plans leave thousands of families with no hope of returning to New Orleans, where rental housing is scarce and costly. In New Orleans, public housing was occupied by women, mostly working, their children, as well as the elderly and disabled. . . . . . . Demolition of public housing in New Orleans is not a new idea. When Katrina displaced New Orleans public housing residents, the Wall Street Journal reported US Congressman Richard Baker, a 10-term Republican from Baton Rouge, telling lobbyists: “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” . . . ☞ So why are Republicans so bad at things like FEMA and HUD? The answer may lie in caffeine-free Diet Coke. CAFFEINE-FREE DIET COKE It must have been invented by the same guy who invented the salt-free potato chip and the guilt-free guilty pleasure. I mean, what is the point? This came to mind with only a modest synaptic leap when I read the following formulation: Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well. Just a bit more from Alan Wolfe’s Washington Monthly essay, Why Conservatives Can’t Govern: Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government. This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems, rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly by George W. Bush, that the money government collects in order to carry out its business properly belongs to the people themselves. One thought, and one thought only, guided Bush and his Republican allies since they assumed power . . . taxes must be cut, and the more they are cut–especially in ways benefiting the rich–the better. But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office, find themselves under constant pressure from constituents to use government to improve their lives. This puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing government agencies whose missions–indeed, whose very existence–they believe to be illegitimate. Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government. ‘THEY DIDN’T SIGN UP FOR THIS’ Finally, while we’re warmly welcoming fiscally prudent, fair-minded Republicans and conservatives to reconsider their party affiliation, consider this section of a recent Hillary Clinton speech: I’m encouraged by the number of the people who come to my events who say they didn’t support me last time and tell me that they are Republican, and I always say, “We’re glad you’re here. Welcome.” And I also ask them, “Well, why are you here?” And they always say something like, “I didn’t sign up for all of this.” They didn’t sign up for a government that interferes with personal, private, intimate relations. They didn’t sign up to be the largest debtors in the history of the world where we have to borrow $60 billion a month from China, Japan, and others. They didn’t sign up for Terry Schiavo to be turned into a tragic, political problem. They didn’t sign up for the United States government who totally dismantled the Federal Emergency Management Agency and battled with colleagues and didn’t know what to do. They didn’t sign up for the mean-spirited divisiveness against gays and lesbians and tried to make it somehow a political issue as to the life you lead and who you are. They didn’t sign up for the politicization of science; they didn’t sign up for the Environmental Protection Agency – which has turned into a misnomer – to tell people mercury in the air and arsenic in water won’t hurt you. They didn’t sign up for an FDA that refuses to make a decision about the emergency contraception known as Plan B. They didn’t sign up for a president who denies global climate changes and refuses to deal with reality of what is happening in our world that has far-reaching consequences for our children and our children’s children. There’s a long list why people are suddenly saying, “We didn’t sign up for this.” . . . SO? HAVE YOU SEEN THE MOVIE? The most conservative thing we can do is conserve the human ecosphere. This transcends party politics. In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to. – Roger Ebert