Early Saturday morning

Christmas officially over. Yea!! I survived.

By the way, I drove by B.'s place of business tonight and he was working.

I'm about ready to invite Maid Green back for a cleaning. First I'll try to get rid of the old rear-projection TV that's been just sitting in the living room now for a couple of months, taking up space.

I haven't finished reading this article yet ("Green Giant: Beijing’s crash program for clean energy"), but I'm beginning to view people who deny that global warming is caused by human activity in the same way I view Holocaust deniers.

[I]n 2001, Chinese officials abruptly expanded one program in particular: energy technology. The reasons were clear. Once the largest oil exporter in East Asia, China was now adding more than two thousand cars a day and importing millions of barrels; its energy security hinged on a flotilla of tankers stretched across distant seas. Meanwhile, China was getting nearly eighty per cent of its electricity from coal, which was rendering the air in much of the country unbreathable and hastening climate changes that could undermine China’s future stability. Rising sea levels were on pace to create more refugees in China than in any other country, even Bangladesh.

In 2006, Chinese leaders redoubled their commitment to new energy technology; they boosted funding for research and set targets for installing wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, and other renewable sources of energy that were higher than goals in the United States. China doubled its wind-power capacity that year, then doubled it again the next year, and the year after. The country had virtually no solar industry in 2003; five years later, it was manufacturing more solar cells than any other country, winning customers from foreign companies that had invented the technology in the first place. As President Hu Jintao, a political heir of Deng Xiaoping, put it in October of this year, China must “seize preëmptive opportunities in the new round of the global energy revolution.” . . .

Unfortunately in the U.S., we have a vocal contingent of people who put no stock in science, since they believe (according to the Bible, New Testament, Book of Revelation, for example) that the physical world is coming to an end anyway and there's no stopping it. Let the destruction continue. It's God's plan. We're at "the End Times." (Viz., Sarah Palin.) (Interesting that Sarah Palin's father was a science teacher. Is there some rebellion going on?)

Note also that this same contingent puts no stock in one of the signature features of our constitutional form of government: the separation of church and state. From the link directly above:

Palin’s church of over 20 years, Wasilla Assembly of God, is led by a pastor who is dedicated to the movement’s ideology, and the church has been a gathering spot for national leaders of the New Apostolic movement for years. Palin was “anointed” in a ceremony at Wasilla Assembly of God by Kenyan Thomas Muthee in 2005, prior to her campaign for state office. Muthee had been featured in a series of movies titled “The Transformations,” produced by the movement to teach spiritual warfare as a way to take Christian “dominion” over government and society. In the ceremony Muthee talked about the seven spheres of society over which the New Apostolics believe they must take control. This ideology is taught through the “Reclaiming the Seven Mountains of Culture” campaign, which promotes the end of separation of church and state and religious pluralism.

Palin returned to Wasilla Assembly of God June 8, 2008, to give the speech at a graduation of Master’s Commission students, a ceremony in which the senior pastor of spoke openly about Alaska as a refuge state in the end times and which culminated in the presentation of swords to the graduating students.

This is just a small fraction of the information that our research team gathered on Palin’s relationship with the New Apostolic Reformation . . . .

[Emphasis added.]