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Here’s Comedy Legend Harold Ramis’ Advice to Young Filmmakers

by CarmonRoy Posted on February 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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Harold Ramis, the influential comedy filmmaker, died on Monday in his hometown of Chicago from complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis. He was 69.

Ramis is best known for directing acclaimed comedies such as Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, and Analyze This, and for cowriting and starring in Ghostbusters. His work has had a huge impact on American comedy over the past 30-plus years. “The simple idiot’s advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, ‘Write good,'” Ramis said during an interview for American Storytellers in 2002. “Nothing sells like a good screenplay.”

Here’s more advice for young filmmakers from Ramis’ American Storytellers interview. It’s worth taking to heart:

You have to live your life with a certain blind confidence that if it’s your destiny to succeed at these things, it will happen, if you just continue to follow a straight path, to do you work as conscientiously and as creatively as you can, and to just stay open to all opportunity and experience. There’s a performing motto at Second City…to say yes instead of no. It’s actually an improvisational rule…It’s about supporting the other person. And the corollary to that is if you concentrate on making other people look good, then we all have the potential to look good. If you’re just worried about yourself—How am I doing? How am I doing?—which is kind of a refrain in Hollywood, you know, people are desperately trying to make their careers in isolation, independent of everyone around them.

And I’ve always found that my career happened as a result of a tremendous synergy of all the talented people I’ve worked with, all helping each other, all connecting, and reconnecting in different combinations. So…identify talented people around you and then instead of going into competition with them, or trying to wipe them out, make alliances, make creative friendships that allow you and your friends to grow together, because someday your friend is going to be sitting across a desk from you running a movie studio.

Watch the full video below:

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Here’s Comedy Legend Harold Ramis’ Advice to Young Filmmakers

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

by FernandoMerrill Posted on January 31, 2014

Mother Jones

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I have been derelict in my duty. A team of Republicans introduced a genuine alternative to Obamacare earlier this week, and I haven’t blogged about it. I’ll be honest: I just couldn’t work up the energy for several reasons.

Even on fleeting inspection, it’s obviously a feeble plan. It would cover very few people; most of the people it does cover couldn’t come close to affording it; and its policies would offer benefits so meager as to be almost useless.
The small amount of good it does is funded by reducing the tax deduction for employer health care. This is a joke. It would meet with massive resistance from virtually every Republican constituency. In particular, Grover Norquist would score it as a tax hike (which it is) and that means it would be DOA in the Republican caucus.
Even without the tax hike, this bill is going nowhere. I’ll give props to Tom Coburn and his friends for at least taking a semi-serious shot at health care reform, but no one seriously thinks it would have any chance of garnering even majority Republican support, let alone passing Congress.

As Dylan Scott reports, the sponsors of this bill have already watered down the tax hike. It barely took them a day. The new wording is a little vague, but it most likely eliminates the new funding entirely. And without funding, the bill is even more of a joke than it was to begin with.

It’s really kind of pointless to pretend that this is a real plan with real prospects of getting Republican support, but if you want to read all the details plan anyway, Jonathan Cohn has you covered here. As always, Cohn is very gentlemanly about the whole thing, but his bottom line is accurate: “The authors of the Patient CARE Act and many of their allies are acting as if conservatives have some magic elixir for health care problems—a way to provide the same kind of security that the Affordable Care Act will, but with a lot less interference in the market and a lot less taxpayer money. It’s all the goodies of liberal health care reform, they imply, but without the unpleasant parts. They’re wrong.”

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There’s Not Much Point in Pretending to Care About the New Republican Health Care Plan

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The U.K. government really, really wants to encourage fracking

by Frederick Cunningham Posted on December 9, 2013

The U.K. government really, really wants to encourage fracking

By

Push Europe

Activists are not pleased with the Tory government’s fracking plans.

The past week was a topsy-turvy one for the fracking industry in Europe, where leaders and residents are sharply split over whether frackers should be allowed to tap shale reserves for natural gas.

The U.K. government is so anxious to see fracking companies get to work that it confirmed it will offer big tax breaks to help encourage the sector. The country’s chief finance minister, George Osborne — whimsically dubbed the chancellor of the Exchequer — confirmed during his autumn budget update that the tax breaks would be put in place. He claimed a fracking boom would bring “thousands of jobs” and “billions of pounds of investment.” (Memo to the chancellor: Frackers have been known to lie about these things.)

While North Sea oil drillers pay as much as 81 percent tax to the U.K. government, Osborne told Parliament that taxes for fracking would be set at just 30 percent. (American state governments, by comparison, often pay frackers to help them offset the costs of drilling.) It’s all part of Osborne’s bid to reduce households’ electricity bills by £50, or about $82, a year, partly by reducing power companies’ environmental taxes, known as green levies.

The tax break plan sparked anger when it was first floated back in the summer, touted at the time by Osborne as the “most generous” tax regime for frackers in the world. And last week’s confirmation that the government would move forward brought more of the same. From The Independent:

Andy Atkins, Friends of the Earth’s executive director, said: “Yet again the long-term health of our economy has been completely undermined by the Chancellor’s short-sighted determination to keep the nation hooked on dirty and increasingly costly fossil fuels … MPs say they are unjustified — and they could be illegal.” The green group claims that Mr Osborne’s shale gas tax breaks could potentially breach EU law because they may represent “unlawful state aid” — putting shale gas operators in a “more favourable tax position” than the traditional North Sea producers.

Meanwhile, in Romania, anti-fracking protesters and unhappy locals sent Chevron packing after storming an exploratory drilling site. Reuters reported on Saturday:

U.S. oil major Chevron halted exploration works for shale gas in eastern Romania for the second time in two months on Saturday after anti-fracking protesters broke through wire mesh fences around the site.

Thousands of people have rallied across Romania in recent months to protest against government support for shale gas exploration and separate plans to set up Europe’s largest open cast gold mine in a small Carpathian town. …

On Saturday, about 300 riot police were deployed in Pungesti, 340 km (210 miles) northeast of capital Bucharest, to try to prevent an equal number of protesters, mostly local residents, from entering the Chevron site. Some broke through into the site, however.

The activists chanted “Stop Chevron” and held banners saying “No drilling allowed here”. Dozens were detained by police.

A valiant effort, but Chevron was back at work by Sunday.


Source
Dismay for green lobby as fracking is given the go-ahead, The Independent
Chevron halts Romania shale work after protest, Reuters
Chevron resumes shale work in Romania despite protest, Agence France-Presse

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The U.K. government really, really wants to encourage fracking

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Shop for Great Deals on ‘Green Friday’ in NYC

by BroderickDuong Posted on November 26, 2013

Photo: ReuseNYC

If you’d rather not shell out your holiday shopping dollars at the big-box stores this year, why not skip Black Friday and try hunting for great deals on Green Friday instead?

On Nov. 29, nonprofit retail locations throughout New York City will participate in ReuseNYC Green Friday — a community-oriented answer to Black Friday that focuses on supporting those in need and preventing waste through secondhand shopping.

More than 40 retail locations will take part in the event by offering a variety of sales in locations across the five boroughs.

Participating retailers include common names like Goodwill and The Salvation Army, and some you may have never heard of, such as the Arthritis Foundation Gift Shop, Cancer Care Thrift Shop, Lower East Side Ecology Center and more.

Deals range from 10 percent off to 50 percent off storewide — meaning you’ll not only score rock-bottom deals but also rest easy knowing your dollars supported causes you care about.

Click here for a map of all participating locations and more information.

Homepage Image: Flickr/Play Among Friends

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Shop for Great Deals on ‘Green Friday’ in NYC

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Naomi Klein says big green groups are more trouble than climate deniers

by dfdedtcf Posted on September 10, 2013

Naomi Klein says big green groups are more trouble than climate deniers

By

Ed KashiNaomi Klein.

Progressive journalist and activist Naomi Klein made waves a couple of years ago with an article in The Nation arguing that climate activism and current-day capitalism are incompatible. An appropriate response to the massive threat of climate change “is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades,” she argued.

Now, in a new interview with Jason Mark of Earth Island Journal, she lambastes major environmental groups for failing to understand this point, for being too tied to the neoliberal agenda and too cozy with corporations.

I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to be very honest with you, I think it’s been more damaging than the right-wing denialism in terms of how much ground we’ve lost. Because it has steered us in directions that have yielded very poor results. I think if we look at the track record of Kyoto, of the UN Clean Development Mechanism, the European Union’s emissions trading scheme — we now have close to a decade that we can measure these schemes against, and it’s disastrous. Not only are emissions up, but you have no end of scams to point to, which gives fodder to the right. The right took on cap-and-trade by saying it’s going to bankrupt us, it’s handouts to corporations, and, by the way, it’s not going to work. And they were right … Not in the bankrupting part, but they were right that this was a massive corporate giveaway, and they were right that it wasn’t going to bring us anywhere near what scientists were saying we needed to do [to] lower emissions. So I think it’s a really important question why the green groups have been so unwilling to follow science to its logical conclusions. …

[For Big Green groups now,] it’s about corporate partnerships. It’s not, “sue the bastards”; it’s, “work through corporate partnerships with the bastards.” …

More than that, it’s casting corporations as the solution, as the willing participants and part of this solution. …

We’ve globalized an utterly untenable economic model of hyperconsumerism. It’s now successfully spreading across the world, and it’s killing us.

It’s not that the green groups were spectators to this — they were partners in this. They were willing participants in this. It’s not every green group. It’s not Greenpeace, it’s not Friends of the Earth, it’s not, for the most part, the Sierra Club. It’s not 350.org, because it didn’t even exist yet. But I think it goes back to the elite roots of the movement, and the fact that when a lot of these conservation groups began there was kind of a noblesse oblige approach to conservation. It was about elites getting together and hiking and deciding to save nature. And then the elites changed. So if the environmental movement was going to decide to fight, they would have had to give up their elite status. And [they] weren’t willing to give up their elite status. I think that’s a huge part of the reason why emissions are where they are.

Like what she’s got to say? Read the rest at Earth Island Journal. And then keep an eye out for Klein’s new book on climate change, due out next year.

Don’t like what she has to say? You’re not alone. Joe Romm at Climate Progress has a thorough takedown, concluding with a quote from Grist’s own David Roberts:

UPDATE: Klein has posted a response to Romm on her website: “if anyone is guilty of taking a sledge hammer to an ally here, I suggest you take a quick glance at what’s in your (bloody) hand.”

Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on Twitter and Google+.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Climate & Energy

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Naomi Klein says big green groups are more trouble than climate deniers

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Glynis Has Your Number – Glynis McCants

by Myrna Posted on August 8, 2013

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Glynis Has Your Number
Discover What Life Has in Store for You Through the Power of Numerology!
Glynis McCants

Genre: Spirituality

Price: $9.99

Publish Date: June 15, 2009

Publisher: Hyperion

Seller: Hyperion, an imprint of Buena Vista Books, Inc.


An accessible guide to everything the simple art of numerology can reveal about your friends, loved ones, colleagues, and — especially — yourself! Glynis McCants has gained a huge following with her on-target celebrity predictions. Now she’s set to help readers lead the life they want with her simple numerology system. Using an ancient but surprisingly easy system of numbers, Glynis will show readers how to recognize their strengths, break harmful patterns, and change their lives for the better. In Glynis Has Your Number , Glynis shows us how to find the unique set of numbers that &quot;vibrate&quot; within each of us, and how these numbers affect every aspect of our lives. Glynis gives readers all the tools they need to test their compatibility with loved ones, better navigate the waters at work, and find success by choosing pursuits that are in sync with their numbers.

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Glynis Has Your Number – Glynis McCants

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Keystone study contractor under scrutiny by State Dept. watchdog

by Aaron Small Posted on August 5, 2013

Keystone study contractor under scrutiny by State Dept. watchdog

By Grist staff

Does the consulting firm studying the environmental effects of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have a conflict of interest?

For months, climate activists have been raising the alarm about Environmental Resources Management (ERM), the main firm contracted by the State Department to write the official environmental impact statement for Keystone.

Now State’s Inspector General is looking into allegations of improper ties and incomplete disclosures.

From The Hill:

The State Department’s internal watchdog has “initiated an inquiry” into whether the contractor Foggy Bottom used for a draft environmental analysis on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline had a conflict of interest.

The move is a response to allegations from several outside groups, Doug Welty, a spokesman with the State Department Office of Inspector General, told The Hill on Friday.

The development raises the possibility of another redo of the analysis assessing Keystone’s environmental impact.

Bloomberg Businessweek explains some of the allegations of improper behavior:

[Friends of the Earth] engaged in opposition research, as it is called during election campaigns, to turn up the evidence that ERM had worked with TransCanada on projects that it had failed to disclose to the U.S. State Department. …

Here, (PDF), for example, is a 2010 document, cached online, in which ERM lists TransCanada as a client. Does this prove that ERM has been biased toward TransCanada in its Keystone assessment? No. But unless this document is a forgery, ERM appears not to have disclosed all it should have to the U.S. government. (ERM declined to comment.)

Meanwhile, there’s another hiccup for Keystone, this one in Nebraska. From The Washington Post:

[A] little-noticed trial scheduled for next month in Nebraska could spell problems for [Keystone].

Despite two attempts by Nebraska’s attorney general to have the case thrown out, Lancaster County District Court Judge Stephanie Stacy has set a Sept. 27 trial date for arguments in a lawsuit that contends the state legislature unconstitutionally gave Gov. Dave Heineman (R) authority to approve the pipeline route.

A win for the plaintiffs — three Nebraska landowners who oppose the pipeline — would force TransCanada, the company that wants to build the 1,179-mile northern leg of the project, to go through the entire siting process again. Even supporters do not believe that would permanently block the project, but it could add years to the timeline.

No wonder TransCanada is now looking to build a big tar-sands oil pipeline that doesn’t cross the U.S. border.

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E.U. bans another bee-killing insecticide

by Edbre23ne Posted on July 17, 2013

E.U. bans another bee-killing insecticide

By John Upton

Shutterstock

This sort of bee behavior is safer in Europe than it is in America.

Bees of America, please don’t take this the wrong way, but it might be time to buzz off to Europe.

The European Union will limit the use of yet another bee-endangering insecticide, part of its efforts to protect pollinators from agricultural poisons.

The use of fipronil, a nerve agent produced by German company BASF and widely applied by farmers to kill insect pests, will be outlawed on corn and sunflower seeds and fields across Europe. From Reuters:

The restrictions take effect from Dec. 31 but seeds which have already been treated can be sown until the end of February 2014.

The ban follows similar EU curbs imposed in April on three of the world’s most widely used pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, and reflects growing concern in Europe over a recent plunge in the population of honeybees critical to crop pollination and production.

A scientific assessment from the EU’s food safety watchdog EFSA said in May that fipronil posed an “acute risk to honeybees when used as a seed treatment for maize”.

Fipronil, mainly sold under the Regent brand name in Europe, may still be used on seeds sown in greenhouses, or leeks, shallots, onions and other vegetables that are harvested before they flower, posing a low risk to foraging bees.

The U.K. and the U.S. have both been reluctant to restrict sales of pesticides that pose a threat to bees, but the U.K. is bound by the European Union’s recent bans and restrictions, while the U.S., of course, is not. Beekeepers and environmentalists in the U.S. are currently suing the EPA in an effort to institute similar bans here. From The Guardian:

Bees and other pollinators are essential in the growing of three-quarters of the world’s crops, but have seen serious declines in recent decades due to habitat loss, disease and pesticide use. In Tuesday’s vote, only the UK, Slovakia and the Czech Republic abstained and only Spain — the biggest user of fipronil — and Romania voted against. The UK was also one of eight of the 27 EU member states that unsuccessfully opposed the EC neonicotinoid ban.

“The UK abstained from the vote as there were concerns that the proposals were not based on sound scientific evidence,” said a [spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs]. “Fipronil is not used in any authorised pesticide in the UK so this ruling will have little impact [here].”

Paul de Zylva, of Friends of the Earth, welcomed the “leadership” of the European commission but added: “Yet again the UK’s pesticide testing regime has proven to be unfit for purpose. It’s disappointing to see the UK government abstaining from another cut and dried opportunity to protect bees.”

To the bees of America: Bon voyage.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Friends of the Earth and Searchinger still wrong about biofuels

by Posted on July 12, 2013

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U.S. trees burned in British coal plants count as renewable energy. WTF?

by AntonioRe Posted on May 29, 2013

U.S. trees burned in British coal plants count as renewable energy. WTF?

By John Upton

ShutterstockiPhone chargers in waiting.

Follow this if you can: Wood from U.S. trees is being shipped over to the U.K., where coal power plants burn it, producing more greenhouse gas emissions than when those same plants generate an equivalent amount of electricity by burning coal.

The weirdest part? This doubly destructive practice is being subsidized in the U.K. to help the country meet its renewable energy targets. WTF?

The BBC explains that when pine trees are grown in America, the best trunks are cut up for wood planks and sold as timber. Much of the rest of the wood is either used for wood pulp or gets chopped up to be used as fuel. Because the wood chips are considered a renewable energy source by the British government, great piles are being shipped over to England to be burned.

“It is the massive scale of this operation that so alarms environmentalists,” BBC environment reporter Roger Harrabin said in a segment aired Tuesday. “Environmentalists say it is madness to be growing trees in the U.S.A. to be keeping the lights on in Britain. But this industy is helping the U.K. meet its targets on renewable energy.”

From a recent article in Power Engineering International:

In November 2012, the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace called on the UK government to cancel plans to subsidise the burning of trees in coal power stations. The RSPB report ‘Dirtier Than Coal?’ says that generating power from typical conifer trees results in 49 per cent more emissions than burning coal, and calls on the government to withdraw public subsidy for generating from feedstock derived from tree trunks.

Biomass generation is booming on the back of climate change legislation and incentives. …

These differ from country to country. As the sector becomes better developed, sophisticated distinctions may have to be built in to encourage the use of biomass that is environmentally and economically sustainable with an acceptable carbon payback period.

In May 2010 the US Environmental Protection Agency decided to include greenhouse gas emissions from biomass energy in its greenhouse gas permit programme. This would treat CO2 emissions from biomass generation and fossil fuels equally. But successful lobbying by the forestry industry led the EPA to defer implementation for three years while it considers how biomass emissions should be determined.

Burning trees for electricity certainly gives new meaning to the term “green energy” – insomuch as it isn’t green at all. Well, I suppose the trees were once green? I guess they’ve got us there.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who

tweets

, posts articles to

Facebook

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blogs about ecology

. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants:

johnupton@gmail.com

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