For many, Yearly Kos ’07 may be already fading into memory, just a week and a half after the Kossacks left Chicago.  But I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the atmosphere around the subject of climate.

I’m one of several Kossacks trained to give a live, updated version of the slideshow from An Inconvenient Truth.  On Sunday, after the Interfaith Service, four of us removed our orange lanyards and presented, tag-team style, as part of The Climate Project for an audience of around 30 good souls (who had gotten the word the night before and managed to get up and going for this unofficial event on the very last day of the conference).

Personally, I find a parallel between the fight to take power back from the lunatics who’ve had it these last six and a half years, and the fight to get us safely out of the climate crisis.  It is going to take the same tenacity in the face of naysayers and strength to protect all that needs protecting.  And if there’s any group I’d put faith in to be a force for goodness and light, it’s this one.  So let’s talk about climate, Kossacks, and Chicago.

Okay, so you watched An Inconvenient Truth.  And if you’re anything like me, it scared the crap out of you – and seemed expertly focused on awareness and the science, with not as much focus on concrete things we can do to help reduce the dangers of climate change.

Well, this diary is help you figure out what you, yes, you!, can do.  For background, I (along with roughly a thousand others, including several Kossacks) was trained in January by Al Gore to give the presentation he gives in An Inconvenient Truth to audiences around the country and world, as part of The Climate Project.  I’ve since developed a few handouts to give at my presentations – one of which is a checklist of things all of us can do to limit greenhouse gas production.  It's included below, plus a lot of resources.

(And, even if you haven’t seen the movie, or a local Climate Presentation yet, this diary will likely still be of benefit to you.  Much more after the fold.)

In the first days of 2007, I went to Nashville for the first time, as did at least three Kossacks I have since learned about.  (Two reports here and here.)  I didn't go for the music, though it was great, and I didn’t go for the food, though that alone was great enough to make me go back.

I went because I was selected to become one of a thousand people trained by Al Gore to give the presentation he gives in "An Inconvenient Truth."  Now, I'm officially part of the Climate Project, an awareness campaign about the climate crisis.

This diary isn't about the training session (which was phenomenal, and had an energy very like Yearly Kos), or about Mr. Gore.  Yesterday’s release by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes this diary more salient, and I do give some details about it after the fold... but this is really a diary about me.  You see, Gore asked us to figure out where our passion for this issue comes from, and to speak from that place when we talk with others.  

So, tonight I picked up a week-old U.S. News and World Report I hadn't read off my coffee table and was stunned to flip it open and find a blurb about the unbelievable Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), House Intelligence Committee Chairman, who until yesterday I had never heard of.  He's the guy who pushed so hard to put all those nuclear secrets - you know, the ones - vetted in passing by linguists, in Arabic, up on the web.

Yeah, that guy.

Well a week ago was a different story entirely... U.S. News was talking about him, saying (you're not going to believe this, follow to the flip:)

So apparently, in a park near where I live, "many as six people have been bitten or scratched by squirrels since May, and that the attacks have become more ferocious in the last month."

The city's response to this, recommended by the Department of Fish and Game, is to start catching and killing the squirrels "in a humane way."  I assume the War On Squirrels is to continue until they stop attacking people or something... but no clear metric for success has been established.

Let me be frank.  I hate effing squirrels.  With a passion.  But I don't believe that killing every squirrel I see is necessarily the most efficient means of making sure they don't bother me any more.

Well, this is the final chapter in my "What I learned at Yearly Kos" diary series.  The catalyst for this chapter didn't actually come from the conference, but from a conversation I had with a fellow YK conference attendee very shortly afterwards.  This person... let's say, "Robin," is a veteran editor, and struck up a conversation with me in the airport on the way home!

As a result, I have a whole new perspective about how the media views internet communities, and I'd like to share. :-)

Anyone who was at Yearly Kos can back me up here - by and large the media completely missed the real story in Vegas.  But I was lost as to how and why.

The answer (I think), and concluding thoughts after the fold.

This is an interesting section for me to write (Part IV in my "What I learned at Yearly Kos" series) because it's one of the most profound things that I took away from the Yearly Kos conference.

I went to the conference knowing it was going to be epic.  I'm not exactly one of the big names around here, and though I'm politically aware, I'm not nearly as involved as I should be in our political process.  The reasons that I went to Vegas in June were to learn about issues, meet people, and figure out the best way to become more involved in the Democratic Party.

So, needless to say, I was stunned - I mean, really shocked, to learn how broken the infrastructure of the Party is and has been for some time.  It's in a shambles.  My search for how to get involved deteriorated quickly into trying to figure out what had happened to cause such massive problems in the Democratic Party that had controlled the government for decades.   I'd like to share with you, through several anecdotes, the results of that search.

Okay, I'm about to make a drastic departure from my first two Yearly Kos diaries, and blog about something that I knew really very little about to start: the economy.

I went to the panel on The Economy for the express purpose of learning, in fact, because aside from a rudimentary understanding of supply and demand, and a poli sci course I took years ago on globalization, I actually know nothing about it.  What I learned about the state of our economy terrified me.  

I had been busy paying to all the obvious (and enormous) problems with the terror that Bush and Co. have wrought: global warming, unnecessary war, incompetent diplomacy in the imploding Middle East, etc.  And all this time, I had been ignoring the silent killer, the `high blood pressure' of Bush's policies, if you will.  The economy.

My guess is this diary'll be easy enough to follow, because I'm no maven, as I've said.  Just one Kossack writing about the things that impacted me at this amazing conference.

I have just finished a Ph.D. in genetics and, like pretty much every scientist I know, am horrified by this administration's really just criminal track record when it comes to distorting, manipulating, and ignoring scientific advice.

But it wasn't until Yearly Kos that it sort of crystallized for me: the most important thing I think each of us can do to discredit the pseudoscience that has become the basis for so much policy regarding global warming, evolution, stem cell research, sex education, etc.  

We need to educate people about the great importance of peer review, that last step of the scientific method.  Confused as to what I mean?  Follow me after the fold.

For background purposes, I attended the Science Bloggers' Caucus (chaired by Darksyde himself) on Thursday and then made sure to be up early Friday for the Championing Science panel, where I had an epiphany of sorts.

It means something.

It does.

The word.  "Marriage."

...You know, I've always been appalled, absolutely appalled, horrified, disgusted and angry at what people have said, done, to other people, just normal people -- fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters, for the sin of loving.  

And recently, I've had a lot of reason to think about this, because I myself just got married.

So, I'm sure this seems somewhat belated to many of you but I've decided to finally post a series of diaries about my impressions, musings, and the wealth of information that I acquired at the phenomenal event known as Yearly Kos.  Anyone who was there knows it's really impossible to fit everything into a single diary.

It's taken me a little while to get this all in order mostly because I got married at the beginning of July, which has kept me a little busy.  In fact, I was going write a diary about the wedding before any of this.  But I'm switching things up a little because I wanted to write about the things that happened in Vegas in semi-chronological order and Bush's appearance yesterday at the NAACP Convention seems like a good occasion to kick things off.  Because the first session I went to at the conference was the Black Caucus.

UPDATE: I was able to find a roommate! Also, please see the new "Unofficial" Roomshare and Rideshare forum set up by LesIsMore at http://yk-roomsandrides.blogspot.com/ ---- head on over to post. See you in June!

Hi all,

My email to the SFKossacks list has gone unanswered (in fact, it might not even have gone through), and my super-stealthy comments in hours-old open threads were probably not the best strategy to begin with, so I'm posting an actual diary about my quest for a Yearly Kos roommate.

Well, I gotta say, I'm writing this and feeling a little like a one-trick pony, but I think it may be time for a reprise of my very first diary here on dailyKOS, written about a year ago, in reaction to the action the community was then taking about the Gonzalez and Rice debates.

Seriously, I am in awe of the energy of this community, especially after this past week - it just pains me to see so much wasted effort ("I'm from out of state but I've called his office 4 times this morning") come from such strong good intentions.

This is a how-to diary, because I know how impenetrable the U.S. Senate can seem, but I also know how Senate offices are structured and how to effectively make your voice heard.  Follow through the flip if you'd like to know how to make your effort valuable, or if you'd like a reminder.

Okay, I'm convinced.

I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but I think it's important to try to articulate why.  I've protested the Iraqi Offensive since before it began, I've (like a good Kossack should) been following the news rabidly, taking in each new horror, and doing my best to not be crippled by the grief of it all.  I've felt powerless, and I've hated (yes, seethingly hated) the criminals who brought the world this illegal, immoral fiasco of a war.  But up until now, I've been waffling on what I think the best course of action is to get out of it.  Sure, I listened to the arguments for immediate pullout, but it just seemed too horrible that we could contemplate bringing one of the oldest, greatest civilizations on the planet so much death and dishonor, and just walk away without trying to fix what we broke.  Well, like I said, I don't know when I changed my mind, but it is now abundantly clear to me that the consequences will be much worse if we don't.

The rant hits fulll stride after the flip.  And ends with a poll.

Just got finished reading yesterdays LA Times article about these ludicrous theme parks popping up all over the country reeling kids in with life-size dinosaur statues and espousing the unbelievably bone-headed belief that dinosaurs and man were contemporaries.  I can't read stories like this without my brain hurting, but this one actually made me scream out loud.  Every paragraph is more and more stupid, culminating, for me, with the following nonsensical idiocy:

"Kids flock to the huge statues. `And it's not like they're crying, 'Oh, mommy, take me out, I'm scared.' They're drawn to it,' Chiles said. `There's something in their DNA that knows man walked with these creatures on Earth.'"

I can't find a diary about it and though it's front page news on WSJ and the SFChronicle, it isn't according to the NYT and WaPo, so many readers here may have missed it.  Apparently, McFlightsuit & Co. have once again lowered the bar for emissions standards of vehicles.  As near as I can tell, the old emissions standards classed all light trucks the same and exempted vehicles over 8500 lbs.  (the H1, H2, or Excursion, for instance) from any standards at all.  The new rules keep this exemption firmly in place, and divide other "light" trucks into 5 classes.  The new rules reduce the emissions requirements for the largest of the five (think Suburban).  While this does tighten emissions standards slightly for the other 4 classes, it's not a change in our thinking about energy and oil dependence.  But then, what did we expect?

"This is a pessimistic decision," Kerry said Tuesday of the new proposal. "It says that America won't be innovative, won't lead and won't create a better future through better technology like we know we can."

More quotes and what you can do after the fold.

I know this diary has nothing to do with Roberts, Plamegate, Cindy Sheehan, or the Iraqi Offensive, but I needed to get it off my chest.

I have been educated at two of the best universities in the world. I enjoy fine wine and organic produce. I have a degree (soon to get another) in biology and a minor in anthropology. I worked in a Senate office for a year. I drive an electric scooter, and I speak English, some French, some Spanish, and some ASL. I'm not as well traveled as I'd like to be but I've lived on both coasts and visited a couple of other countries. I have worked hard and I've become an intelligent, highly functional member of society. I have a great life, and a great love with beautiful blue eyes who has far less melanin than I. You see, I am black.  Black people don't usually do all those things I just said, though, right? So why did I? Well, it's obvious ---- I've secretly wanted to be white all my life.

Sound ridiculous? It should.

This post has two points.  But first you're going to have to listen to a couple of anecdotes and a story.  

So, I recently bought a shiny new electric scooter, a silver EVT-4000e, and so far, I'm loving it.  This is my second electric moped.

Most people, when you say the word "scooter," think of the Razor scooters that the neighborhood kids are into, or maybe the things that disabled/elderly people ride around in.  Well, here I'm talking about a 2-wheeled vehicle with a seat (and hopefully a suspension) that is capable of going at around 30mph.  In CA, if it's electric,  these can ride in the bike lanes.  

If it sounds like pretty much the ideal high efficiency commuting vehicle, that's because it is.  Especially in an area like mine, that gets 300 days of sun a year.  There are many different makes and models and I hereby declare myself a resource if anyone wants to ask questions because it's a lot of research to figure this out.

More info/review of electric scooters and thoughts about our energy consumption in general after the fold.