Skip to main content

The Oscar's Speech

Have you ever dreamed what you'd say if you won an Oscar? Here is a first draft of mine.

I would like to thank all the people that made it possible for me to be here. It is through your effort that we share this award. I promised myself I would not miss the chance to reach such a broad audience and simply express my gratitude to the wonderful people I will name backstage. People whose own accomplishments speak to their greatness and need no one, not me to validate them on this stage. They are wonderful people in their own right.

We have a pressing moral issue at hand that has been ignored for much too long. The Earth, our Environment, is being ignored. For too long the environmental issue has been portrayed as a fight between ecology and economy, between trees and jobs. This is not true.

The moral issue is theft and whether you are okay with it. I don't have children or children of children and I am pissed off at the wholesale theft of the environment; theft from future generations. The Earth does not belong to us. It does not belong to this generation alone. 

We can not justify this theft on the basis of jobs either, for the jobs we create are temporary not ones that will build the economy for the future. What will be the down the road benefit of creating oil-rig jobs? When the oil stops flowing the job is gone.

It is time we re-framed this debate. It is time we stop obscuring the moral issue so we can justify our stealing. This is a nation built by do-it-yourself-ers. We are an enterprising nation. We don't need to steal from future generations to solve problems today. We can do it ourselves. Now.

[As the Native America Proverb says: "We don't inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children." 
                                   -- added 4/22/11 from Felix Arroyo's Facebook Status]

Thank you.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multiple Assignments in Ruby

In this Rails project I'm running I need to set a whole bunch of individual variables to 'disabled' at once depending on the group the current user belongs to. We can use multiple assignment in this case but with a caveat. Multiple assignments are a quick way of setting a lot of variables at once. h, k = 1,2  => [1,2] h => 1 k => 2 but   h, k = 1      => 1 h => 1 k => nil In that case we can do this: h = k = 1   => 1 h => 1 h => 1  Beware this sets them to the same object. So if you change one you change both. h = k = [] h << 1 h => [1] k => [1] While we're at it here is how to reverse two variables: h = 1 k = 2 h,k = k,h h => 2 k => 1
Post a Comment
Read more

What Medieval Economics can teach us about tariffs.

As a teen, I used to play Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with my friends. This started an interest in the medieval period that led to me taking a medieval history class in college just to understand the period more. Over the years I've also read great books like " Dungeon, Fire and Sword " about the crusades (I recommend the book) and yet with all that knowledge it wasn't until recently that it occurred to me I had a completely wrong understanding of economics in the Medieval Period. "Viking helmets, sword and footwear" by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 In my D&D games, players who are adventures battling monsters and creatures would need equipment and on the trips to town, they'd get resupplied with their adventuring necessities. I'd run these moments referencing my imagination of what it must have been and fantasy books I'd read. There be an inn with a raucous bar, a gruffly black-smith, if a city also a weapon and armor sm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Best Tech Books

Best Tech Books for Programming Language Learning I'm a bit of a polyglot no only in human languages (English, Spanish, Japanese) but also with programming languages. I found that the best way to get a deep understanding of the programming field, I needed to be broad. I got introduced to Bruce Tate's 7 languages in 7 weeks series right when I was starting to learn Ruby and found the cross-language trends to be very useful in knowing what to learn for the future.  So here is a list of Programming Books that I found good for learning a language. These are the must have books in my opinion to "get" or "grok" the language. Most of these books I have not finished but they're so good I can recommend them for other language learners and polyglots. All these books should accelerate your learning dramatically.  Poignant Guide to Ruby Ruby: POODR and _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby .  Okay, so _why's Poignant Guide to Ruby is the reason I fell in love with ...
Post a Comment
Read more