Hunter Bishop opines on Andrew Walden and his Hilo-based paper, the Hawaii Free Press:
Post outs isle paper as scandalmonger
Ian Lind at iland.net [sic] today alerts us to the part of this Washington Post story about right-wing loony [really, now!--P.Z.] Andrew Walden, publisher of Hawaii Free Press.
Seems Walden now may claim the dishonor of being the first in the nation to publish certain false and malicious rumors about Barack Obama that had been circulating on the Internet by way of an anonymous e-mail chain, according to the Post.
Of course around here discerning readers already know of Walden's tortured relationship with truth. Now it's known nationwide. Walden will probably crow perversely about the notoriety when he should be embarrassed to be exposed as a hack on such a grand scale.
Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Walden's active in the Republican party. Does the party condone this sort of political thuggery? Or does the GOP like having Walden's newspaper around for this very purpose, spreading smear campaigns?
==
Walden addresses the Post here.
Update: Hattie's Web comments.
Walden's article quoted in the Post: Here.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Worse Than Grandma's Depression
June 30, 2008
Worse Than Grandma's Depression
This isn't so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse's performance technique. Something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones...? to quote the master.
What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.
We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.
We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked "money" into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism -- 1870 - 1914 -- had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)
Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation -- money defaulted out-of-existence.
This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.
The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere "liquidity" (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless "creative" securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.
Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I've called this situation The Long Emergency.
Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I've tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with "solutions" to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life -- mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape -- but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the "environmental" elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.
So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don't know everything, I can't say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak.
Worse Than Grandma's Depression
This isn't so funny anymore. Intimations of a July banking collapse rumbled though the Internet this weekend while mainstream news orgs like The New York Times and CNN pulled their puds over swift boats and Amy Winehouse's performance technique. Something is happening, and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones...? to quote the master.
What's happening is that American society is sliding into a greater depression than the one Grandma lived through. On the technical side, there has been unending controversy as to whether we're gripped by inflation or deflation. It's certainly deceptive. Food and gasoline prices are rising faster than the rivers of Iowa. But the prices of assets, like houses, stocks, jet-skis, GMC Yukons and pre-owned Hummel figurines are cratering as America turns into Yard Sale Nation.
We're a very different country than we were in 1932. In that earlier crisis of capital, few people had any money but our society still possessed fantastic resources. We had plenty of everything that our land could provide: a treasure trove of mineral ores and the equipment to refine it all, a wealth of oil and gas still in the ground, and all the rigs needed to get at it, manpower galore (and of a highly disciplined, regimented kind), with fine-tuned factories waiting for orders. We had a railroad system that was the envy of the world and millions of family farms (even despite the dust bowl) owned by people who retained age-old skills not yet degraded by agribusiness. We had fully-functional cities with operating waterfronts and ten thousand small towns with local economies, local newspapers, and local culture.
We had a crisis of capital in the 1930s for reasons that are still debated today. My own guess is a combination of a bad debt workout that sucked "money" into a black hole (since money is loaned into existence, but vanishes if the loans are not systematically paid back) plus a gross saturation of markets, meaning that every American who had wanted to buy a car or an electric toaster had done so and there was no one left to sell to. (The first round of globalism -- 1870 - 1914 -- had shut down after the fiasco of World War One.)
Our debt problems today are of a magnitude so extreme that astronomers would be hard pressed to calculate them. By any rational measure our society is comprehensively bankrupt. From the federal treasury down to the suburban cul-de-sacs so much loaned money is either not being paid back, or is at risk of never being paid back, that the suckage of presumed wealth has passed through an event horizon out of the known universe into some other realm of space-time, never to be seen again in this realm. This would seem to be the very essence of monetary deflation -- money defaulted out-of-existence.
This condition is partly disguised by both the loss of credibility of US currency and real-world scarcities of oil and food, but the upshot will be something at least twice as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s: people with no money in a land with no resources (with manpower that has no discipline), hardly any family farms left, cities that are basket-cases of bottomless need, comatose small towns stripped of their assets and social capital, an aviation industry on the verge of death, and a railroad system that is the laughingstock of the world. Not to mention the mind-boggling liabilities of suburbia and the motoring infrastructure that services it.
The banks have been doing their death dance for an entire year now, pretending that their problems are those of mere "liquidity" (i.e. cash-on-hand) rather than insolvency (no cash either on hand or in the vault and nothing else to sell to raise cash except worthless "creative" securities that nobody would ever buy). But the destruction of money (resulting from loans not paid back) is now so intense that the game of pretend has reached its terminal point. The question for the moment is exactly who and what will be crushed as these institutions roll over and die.
Complicating matters is a global oil predicament that is really not hard to understand, but which the organs of news and opinion have obdurately failed to explicate for an anxious public. Call it Peak Oil. There are only a few elements of it you need to know. 1.) that demand has now permanently outstripped supply; 2.) that new discoveries are too meager to offset consumption; 3.) That under under the circumstances, the systems we rely on for daily life are crumbling. I've called this situation The Long Emergency.
Our chances of mitigating this, and of continuing our current way-of-life is about zero. I've tried to promote the idea that rather than waste remaining resources in the futile attempt to sustain the unsustainable (i.e. come up with "solutions" to keep suburbia running), that we should begin immediately making other arrangements for daily life -- mainly by downscaling and re-scaling everything from farming to commerce to the way we inhabit the landscape -- but my suggestions have proven unpopular even among the "environmental" elites, who are too busy being entranced by new-and-groovy ways to keep all the cars running.
So where we are at now is the equivalent of standing in the slop by the ocean shore under a gathering hundred-foot-high wave that is about to come crashing down on our heads. Since I sure don't know everything, I can't say how this will all play out in the months ahead, especially with the presidential election coming at the exact moment that voters will be turning on their furnaces for the cold and dark winter beyond. I would venture to say that so far our society as a whole has done a piss-poor job of comprehending the situation. But there is still the possibility, with four months of politicking left, that the nature of our predicament can be articulated in a way that few can fail to understand, the way Mr, Lincoln articulated the terms of the Civil War on the eve of its fateful outbreak.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
What Now? Part Three
A 23 June post on HunterBishop.com mentions this:
Also in these comments from Tiffany was the agenda for the County Council's Human Services and Economic Development Committee meeting at 9:30 a.m. July 1 in Hilo, where the closing of the Hawaii Island Journal will be discussed:
Comm. 1296:
PRESENTATION BY HAWAI‘I ISLAND JOURNAL REPRESENTATIVES ON THE DEMISE OF THE ISLAND’S INDEPENDENTLY OWNED ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER
From Councilmember Emily Naeole, dated June 12, 2008, requesting the above presentation.
That should prove to be interesting.
-----
Would Naeole have gone through the trouble if it were the Hawaii Free Press that went under?
But "a flicker of hope remains" :
And another note on the Journal. There's a small chance that the reports of its demise may be premature. I understand that at least one buyer is interested and that the newspaper's staff has remained largely intact, though unpaid, pending further developments. Nothing certain, but a flicker of hope remains.
=====
Hunter Bishop doesn't mention Andrew Walden's HFP article that suggests Stephens Media may have acquired some of the Journal's assets. I see that Rob Brezsny's syndicated "Free Will Astrology" column, a Journal staple, has made its debut in the 25 June Big Island Weekly.
======
In that same issue of the Big Island Weekly, there is a letter by Galen Kelly that takes a very different view of the demise of the Journal:
Socialism is not a term to be easily tossed about. And no, I'm not afraid of the word, but more on that in a minute. Kristine, your two opening paragraphs (June 18) lead the reader to believe that what follows is your take on, and response to, the sinking of The Hawaii Island Journal. We get a bit of that and then are lead [sic] down the path of socialism and global warming. Firstly, it's my belief that the Journal was dying a slow death long before the BIW came on the scene; my own perception of it was that it was killing itself with moderation (mostly in its lukewarm coverage of the war), with playing it safe, with avoiding the kind of controversy that shines a light on many of the corruptions we face today. It is the Internet that houses the bravest of journalists and the most uninhibited informing, leaving in the dust those who still honor the status-quo and cower to power. Many papers are suffering under this phenomenon. The Big Island Weekly can escape that and seems to be going further in bringing the truth, even when the truth is ugly. May it continue to grow in being brave and uncompromising. [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.]
==
30 June update: This column by Andrew Walden, "Bloggers Buzz Over Big Island Media Shakeup," appeared in the 17 December 2006 issue of HawaiiReporter.com. It has proven to be prescient. In retrospect, the decline of the Journal might be traced to its acquisition by the Honolulu Weekly, though some would blame pre-Weekly editor Lane Wick for steering the paper back to the arcaneness which plagued the Journal's predecessor, Ka'u Landing, in the late nineties: [Note: I added the names of HunterBishop comment authors, and the dates when they were published.--P.Z.]
Special from Hawaii Free Press
By Andrew Walden, 12/17/2006 2:40:01
With the December 6 introduction of Big Island Weekly, Las Vegas-based Stevens Media, owner of the Hawaii Tribune Herald, West Hawaii Today, North Hawaii News, Westside Weekly, and the Kamaaina Shopper enters the Big Island alternative media space. This move continues the reshaping of a print media scene marked by the termination earlier this year of reporter Hunter Bishop and others at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, and now by the resignations of reporters Tiffany Edwards and Betsy Tranquilli from West Hawaii Today.
To counter the challenge from Big Island Weekly, the South Kona-based Journal is believed to be considering adopting a weekly format [Hawaii Island Journal never went weekly--P.Z.] and opening an office in (gasp) Hilo, considered by some of its Kona readers to be a “bastion of low-IQ people”.
Commenting on the first issue of Big Island Weekly, Bishop writes on his Blog, [link added by P.Z.] “Editor Kristine Kubat, a Puna geothermal protester in the early '90s, pulled out all the environmental stops in the inaugural issue, including an interview with her old friend Palikapu Dedman….”
More fake environmentalism from those who oppose accepting Madame Pele’s gift to Hawaii--clean geothermal electricity--can only be a sign the Big Island Weekly is aiming at the heart of the HIJ’s political base of anti-environmental “environmentalists”.
...
Say the readers of Bishop’s Puna-focused blog:
“I can't say I've been satisfied with the quality of Hawaii Island Journal since the purchase by the Honolulu Weekly. The size of the paper has dwindled and with it, the amount of quality content. Perhaps it will improve as a weekly but I won't hold my breath. That said, the publisher of BIW (Stephens Media) does not instill a lot of confidence in this reader that the average BIW will be any more worthy of my time than their Kamaaina Shopper already is.” [2nd comment, Rodion, 12 Dec. 2006]
“I kind of stopped reading the HIJ just because those articles were getting super long and cumbersome to read and because the overall subject matter was not that interesting to me.” [10th comment, Josephine Keliipio (was nativeroots), 14 Dec. 2006]
“[Hawaii Island Journal] used to come out with hard-hitting articles that focused attention on important issues. When is the last time they broke a major story? It seems that all they can manage now is a lot of new-age philosophy, which probably pleases some of their advertisers but doesn't do much for me. Oh yes, they will decry injustice and support the environment generically, but investigative reporting is what is needed. An expose' on the good old boy local power structure, or on the inequities in the local government funding structure might get my attention again. I don't even bother to pick it up any more, so somebody will have to tell me if they get it back on track.” [11th comment, Wankine, 14 Dec. 2006]
...
Also in these comments from Tiffany was the agenda for the County Council's Human Services and Economic Development Committee meeting at 9:30 a.m. July 1 in Hilo, where the closing of the Hawaii Island Journal will be discussed:
Comm. 1296:
PRESENTATION BY HAWAI‘I ISLAND JOURNAL REPRESENTATIVES ON THE DEMISE OF THE ISLAND’S INDEPENDENTLY OWNED ALTERNATIVE NEWSPAPER
From Councilmember Emily Naeole, dated June 12, 2008, requesting the above presentation.
That should prove to be interesting.
-----
Would Naeole have gone through the trouble if it were the Hawaii Free Press that went under?
But "a flicker of hope remains" :
And another note on the Journal. There's a small chance that the reports of its demise may be premature. I understand that at least one buyer is interested and that the newspaper's staff has remained largely intact, though unpaid, pending further developments. Nothing certain, but a flicker of hope remains.
=====
Hunter Bishop doesn't mention Andrew Walden's HFP article that suggests Stephens Media may have acquired some of the Journal's assets. I see that Rob Brezsny's syndicated "Free Will Astrology" column, a Journal staple, has made its debut in the 25 June Big Island Weekly.
======
In that same issue of the Big Island Weekly, there is a letter by Galen Kelly that takes a very different view of the demise of the Journal:
Socialism is not a term to be easily tossed about. And no, I'm not afraid of the word, but more on that in a minute. Kristine, your two opening paragraphs (June 18) lead the reader to believe that what follows is your take on, and response to, the sinking of The Hawaii Island Journal. We get a bit of that and then are lead [sic] down the path of socialism and global warming. Firstly, it's my belief that the Journal was dying a slow death long before the BIW came on the scene; my own perception of it was that it was killing itself with moderation (mostly in its lukewarm coverage of the war), with playing it safe, with avoiding the kind of controversy that shines a light on many of the corruptions we face today. It is the Internet that houses the bravest of journalists and the most uninhibited informing, leaving in the dust those who still honor the status-quo and cower to power. Many papers are suffering under this phenomenon. The Big Island Weekly can escape that and seems to be going further in bringing the truth, even when the truth is ugly. May it continue to grow in being brave and uncompromising. [Emphasis mine.--P.Z.]
==
30 June update: This column by Andrew Walden, "Bloggers Buzz Over Big Island Media Shakeup," appeared in the 17 December 2006 issue of HawaiiReporter.com. It has proven to be prescient. In retrospect, the decline of the Journal might be traced to its acquisition by the Honolulu Weekly, though some would blame pre-Weekly editor Lane Wick for steering the paper back to the arcaneness which plagued the Journal's predecessor, Ka'u Landing, in the late nineties: [Note: I added the names of HunterBishop comment authors, and the dates when they were published.--P.Z.]
Special from Hawaii Free Press
By Andrew Walden, 12/17/2006 2:40:01
With the December 6 introduction of Big Island Weekly, Las Vegas-based Stevens Media, owner of the Hawaii Tribune Herald, West Hawaii Today, North Hawaii News, Westside Weekly, and the Kamaaina Shopper enters the Big Island alternative media space. This move continues the reshaping of a print media scene marked by the termination earlier this year of reporter Hunter Bishop and others at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald, and now by the resignations of reporters Tiffany Edwards and Betsy Tranquilli from West Hawaii Today.
To counter the challenge from Big Island Weekly, the South Kona-based Journal is believed to be considering adopting a weekly format [Hawaii Island Journal never went weekly--P.Z.] and opening an office in (gasp) Hilo, considered by some of its Kona readers to be a “bastion of low-IQ people”.
Commenting on the first issue of Big Island Weekly, Bishop writes on his Blog, [link added by P.Z.] “Editor Kristine Kubat, a Puna geothermal protester in the early '90s, pulled out all the environmental stops in the inaugural issue, including an interview with her old friend Palikapu Dedman….”
More fake environmentalism from those who oppose accepting Madame Pele’s gift to Hawaii--clean geothermal electricity--can only be a sign the Big Island Weekly is aiming at the heart of the HIJ’s political base of anti-environmental “environmentalists”.
...
Say the readers of Bishop’s Puna-focused blog:
“I can't say I've been satisfied with the quality of Hawaii Island Journal since the purchase by the Honolulu Weekly. The size of the paper has dwindled and with it, the amount of quality content. Perhaps it will improve as a weekly but I won't hold my breath. That said, the publisher of BIW (Stephens Media) does not instill a lot of confidence in this reader that the average BIW will be any more worthy of my time than their Kamaaina Shopper already is.” [2nd comment, Rodion, 12 Dec. 2006]
“I kind of stopped reading the HIJ just because those articles were getting super long and cumbersome to read and because the overall subject matter was not that interesting to me.” [10th comment, Josephine Keliipio (was nativeroots), 14 Dec. 2006]
“[Hawaii Island Journal] used to come out with hard-hitting articles that focused attention on important issues. When is the last time they broke a major story? It seems that all they can manage now is a lot of new-age philosophy, which probably pleases some of their advertisers but doesn't do much for me. Oh yes, they will decry injustice and support the environment generically, but investigative reporting is what is needed. An expose' on the good old boy local power structure, or on the inequities in the local government funding structure might get my attention again. I don't even bother to pick it up any more, so somebody will have to tell me if they get it back on track.” [11th comment, Wankine, 14 Dec. 2006]
...
Friday, June 27, 2008
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Hawaii: Peak Oil Canary
The Oil Drum on how peak oil might affect Hawaii. One commenter notes already more silent nights because motorcyclists and hot rodders can't afford gas.
Monday, June 16, 2008
What Now? Part Two
Foreshadowing in this 2007 issue of the Hawaii Island Journal.
The cover article in the 10-23 March 2007 issue of the Hawaii Island Journal (pictured), "Corporate Media," by HIJ editor Peter Serafin, deals with pseudo-alternative papers, and mentions the Big Island Weekly, which had debuted a few months before. Serafin also points out that "newsgathering resources are being cut at unprecedented rates, and the quality of information available to citizens has suffered.
"A local example: Using the industry's standard ratio to determine the number of editorial staffers a newspaper needs to serve a given number of readers, Stephens Media's Hawaii Tribune-Herald is understaffed. This means HT-H staff reporters don't always have time to be as thorough as they'd like, and some stories aren't covered as well as well as they could be--if they're covered at all. There simply aren't enough people to do the work."
Sunday, June 15, 2008
What Now?
was the title of a cartoon by Keith [not Ken, mea culpa] Tucker that ran occasionally in the Hawaii Island Journal. It was also the headline of the HIJ's second-to-last issue, and it's the question some are asking now that the final issue has hit stands.
In retrospect, the Journal (owned by Honolulu Weekly since 2005) has been struggling for some time. I noticed the paper had lately thinned out to twenty pages. Hattie has eyed the Big Island Weekly with suspicion as a faux-alternative paper designed to drain advertising away from the Journal, and she's probably right.
If there's a winner, or at least a survivor, it's the Hawaii Free Press, the center-right newspaper founded at the beginning of 2005 by Andrew Walden. It eschews the cultural coverage of the two other papers in favor of news and opinion. Each issue is only eight pages but there is little filler (few ads, no cartoons or horoscopes).
I'll try to post more about the HIJ later.
Update: This is perhaps the strongest post about the HIJ's demise.
An excerpt:
My understanding is that the Honolulu Weekly (and the Hawaii Island Journal) are (were) printed on the Star-Bulletin/MidWeek presses, and that the Advertiser isn't a competitive option. That is, they won't print alternative weeklies. If there are so few options, that makes publication of a weekly paper a precarious thing. With the price of shipping going up, I wonder if printing any paper out of town can make economic sense (I just don't know). If the Big Island wants to have a free weekly paper, what choices do they have to print it locally, that is, economically?
And let's face it, we're getting mostly ads and entertainment listings in the Honolulu Weekly. It's no Village Voice, and journalism isn't its main thrust. While I'm glad to see the articles they do run, those articles are very few. We're not necessarily getting our money's worth.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Airships Over Manhattan
http://theboweryboys.blogspot.com/2008/06/dinosaurs-of-new-york-skyline.html
Saturday, June 07, 2008
Generation Y Illustrated
wonderfully by this Forbes cover of almost eighteen years ago. Generation Y includes the big-spending "4-to-12-year-olds" (born c. 1978-1986) that were the focus of Peter Newcomb's cover story, "Hey Dude, Let's Consume."
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Little People
MicroCinemaDVD.com had a banner advertising Slant, a compilation of Asian-American short films. The ad featured an array of wooden finger puppets. I remember playing with these a long time ago. According to this, Fisher Price made all kinds of Little People.
Update: Little People became 'chunky' in the early nineties and are still made that way.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Life in the Crash Lane
Kunstler writes in The Washington Post and notes on his own site that the Long Emergency is probably here.
May 26, 2008
Anxious Hiatus
Loveliness was everywhere this holiday weekend in upstate New York, and it was probably hard for many to believe that the wayward nation would return to the dread uncertainty of life in the crash lane [a much better title for this post, I think--P.Z.] when the barbeques were over. There was even a wan overtone to the late-night sports news about the Indy 500 race -- as though the spectacle of cars droning round and round a speed oval epitomized the futility of American life in this moment of our history.
I had a discussion with one guy at a Sunday night party about the prospects for hydrogen-powered cars. We rehearsed the usual reasons why such a system was unlikely to get up-and-running -- and then he said, "...but what if we took all the money from the war and put it into something like the space program and... they came up with some way to make it happen...!"
This is certainly the golden heart of the great wish out there, as the empire of Happy Motoring begins to run down on $4 gasoline. It seems inconceivable that a society so bold as to put men on the moon (fer crissake) can't overcome such a prosaic problem as finding something other than oil byproducts to run our cars on.
From this holy font all cognitive dissonance flows.
It seems inconceivable, but it begins to look like that's the way it really is, and we just can't accept it.
Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.
We're at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what's next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world's biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn't have in 1933 was cash money.
The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital -- though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared. We have plenty of manpower earnestly eager to become American Idols (but certainly not for heavy labor). Our oil industry now supplies only a fraction of the world's daily supply (and not even enough for half of our own needs).
What happens now? We face not just change but convulsive change. The public senses the rapid unraveling of our car-centric arrangements. In the week before the holiday, gasoline prices went up several cents each day -- in upstate New York, it crossed the $4 mark and kept going up. The trucking system faces collapse as diesel fuel price-rises exceed even the rise in gasoline, and the vast number of independent truckers who make up the system confront the individual calamity of a personal business failure. American Airlines last week announced severe measures to keep operating through the fall of 2008. but none of the airlines can feasibly carry on as usual with oil prices above $120-a-barrel -- and the ominous message is of a business model that has no conceivable way to adapt to the new reality. Most likely, in a very few years air travel will no longer be a "consumer" enterprise.
In the background of these practical problems -- "off screen" during the holiday of car races and ball games -- is a crisis of capital orders of magnitude worse than the one faced by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. For behind the "liquidity" (i.e. insolvency) issues faced by the big institutions lurks the Godzilla of the derivatives trade, which has evolved into a black hole capable of sucking all notional "money" into oblivion. That "money," which represents the aggregate value of our society, also amounts to the emperor's new clothes of an empire in serious trouble. As the black hole of derivatives sucks away these "new clothes," America will stand naked against the elements of fate.
May 26, 2008
Anxious Hiatus
Loveliness was everywhere this holiday weekend in upstate New York, and it was probably hard for many to believe that the wayward nation would return to the dread uncertainty of life in the crash lane [a much better title for this post, I think--P.Z.] when the barbeques were over. There was even a wan overtone to the late-night sports news about the Indy 500 race -- as though the spectacle of cars droning round and round a speed oval epitomized the futility of American life in this moment of our history.
I had a discussion with one guy at a Sunday night party about the prospects for hydrogen-powered cars. We rehearsed the usual reasons why such a system was unlikely to get up-and-running -- and then he said, "...but what if we took all the money from the war and put it into something like the space program and... they came up with some way to make it happen...!"
This is certainly the golden heart of the great wish out there, as the empire of Happy Motoring begins to run down on $4 gasoline. It seems inconceivable that a society so bold as to put men on the moon (fer crissake) can't overcome such a prosaic problem as finding something other than oil byproducts to run our cars on.
From this holy font all cognitive dissonance flows.
It seems inconceivable, but it begins to look like that's the way it really is, and we just can't accept it.
Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.
We're at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what's next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world's biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn't have in 1933 was cash money.
The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital -- though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared. We have plenty of manpower earnestly eager to become American Idols (but certainly not for heavy labor). Our oil industry now supplies only a fraction of the world's daily supply (and not even enough for half of our own needs).
What happens now? We face not just change but convulsive change. The public senses the rapid unraveling of our car-centric arrangements. In the week before the holiday, gasoline prices went up several cents each day -- in upstate New York, it crossed the $4 mark and kept going up. The trucking system faces collapse as diesel fuel price-rises exceed even the rise in gasoline, and the vast number of independent truckers who make up the system confront the individual calamity of a personal business failure. American Airlines last week announced severe measures to keep operating through the fall of 2008. but none of the airlines can feasibly carry on as usual with oil prices above $120-a-barrel -- and the ominous message is of a business model that has no conceivable way to adapt to the new reality. Most likely, in a very few years air travel will no longer be a "consumer" enterprise.
In the background of these practical problems -- "off screen" during the holiday of car races and ball games -- is a crisis of capital orders of magnitude worse than the one faced by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. For behind the "liquidity" (i.e. insolvency) issues faced by the big institutions lurks the Godzilla of the derivatives trade, which has evolved into a black hole capable of sucking all notional "money" into oblivion. That "money," which represents the aggregate value of our society, also amounts to the emperor's new clothes of an empire in serious trouble. As the black hole of derivatives sucks away these "new clothes," America will stand naked against the elements of fate.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Cockburn vs. Clinton
Alexander Cockburn kicks knowledge and science like few others. In his latest column, he lays down a scathing rebuke of Hillary Clinton:
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
The Post-Oil Novel
Some prime examples of this emerging genre of speculative fiction are discussed. http://energybulletin.net/44031.html
To all these I would add Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, summarized on the author's website thusly:
After the age of fossil/nuke ... a new era dawned ... Climb aboard our sleek, quiet, supremely comfortable hydrogen-powered "Hairliner" as we fly halfway around an Earth of A.D. 2030 that has mastered the problems of energy and the environment. Beneath us we see a post-industrial world booming with the wealth and harmony of a revolution in green power, one brewing since 1952, but finally in place. Written by one of the world's leading advocates of renewable energy, SOLARTOPIA takes its place with LOOKING BACKWARD and ECOTOPIA in classic visionary thinking. Read this once -- your view of the future will never be the same.
==
19 January 2009 update:
Frank Kaminski wrote in his review of peak- and post-oil novels (linked above) that:
"They are most certainly the vanguard of an entire subgenre of such books, an increasing number of which will be written by veteran speculative fiction authors (assuming, of course, that we have enough energy to keep the presses running). This is not mere speculation; other authors are now waiting to deliver their own unique takes on peak oil. Speculative fiction-short-story-writer Paolo Bacigalupi, for one, clearly seemed quite engaged on the subject during an interview with Locus Magazine this past year."[25]
25 “Paolo Bacigalupi: Facing the Tiger,” Locus, issue 558, vol. 59, no. 1 (July 2007): 76-8.
Indeed, as Annalee Newitz reported:
"Awesome eco-scifi author Paolo Bacigalupi reports that he's just sold an intriguing-sounding dystopian novel to publisher Little, Brown. Bacigalupi writes, "The book in question is Ship Breaker, a young adult novel about all of my favorite things: global warming, peak oil, genetic engineering, poverty and collapsed societies. You know, happy fun stuff. Fortunately, it’s also a ripping adventure. Joe Monti at Little, Brown is the cool guy who decided to buy it, in a two-book deal." Bacigalupi has already published a book of short stories, Pump Six, [No, it has nothing to do with gas stations--P.Z.] and is working on another novel called The Windup Girl. [via Windup Stories]"
Kaminski noted that the peak-oil genre is taking off:
"...Peak oil enthusiasts have indeed begun doing all of these things, as evidenced by the online discussion boards, book reviews, and post-oil short story contests. It will be interesting to see how their debate evolves, as well as how the post-oil novel, and the unlikely partnership between speculative fiction and peak oil, build over time."
A brief search for the abovementioned turned up a story fragment on how not even the Amish are immune to the deprivations wrought by peak oil. There is also an interview with Robert Pogue Ziegler, who won a Rocky Mountain News-sponsored short-story contest with his post-carbon story "Heirlooms."
And Alan Wartes lets out a full-throated "peak oil rallying cry to artists":
"...What we desperately need now are new stories. ...
Artists, we need you. We need your vision and your courage to tell the truth. We’ve got plenty of “analysis,” and enough punditry to last us forever. What we lack are the gut-wrenching stories that put a human face on the collapse that is upon us. We lack imagination to see through the present smoke and dust to what comes next. We lack the icons of this revolution that can sum up the future in a single phrase or image - and suggest what must be done to face it. ...
I offer this small step forward: at So Long, Hydrocarbon Man, we will now take submissions of poems, short films, short stories and images that speak to the realities of peak oil, climate change and life at the end of the era of Hydrocarbon Man. Visit the site and read our submission guidelines. Spread the word to artists: a challenge has been issued to create stories that tell the truth about where we are and ones that imagine the possibilities of where we can go from here. ..."
Alan Wartes is a filmmaker, writer and musician. He writes a blog at www.hydrocarbonman.com,[now defunct--P.Z.] a site that is now taking submissions for art work - short films, poems, short stories and photos - that speaks directly to life at the 'end of the era of Hydrocarbon Man.'"
Kaminski soon revisited the peak-/post-oil novel by reviewing Ill Wind, a book set in a post-oil world but not about peak oil, unlike the novels in his previous review. (In the story, experimental oil-eating microbes set loose on a tanker spill escape to devour the world's petroleum.)
The essay also lists books of the related genre of "green science fiction" or ecotopian fiction (defined by Wikipedia as "a subgenre of Utopian fiction where the author posits either a utopian or dystopian world revolving around environmental conservation or destruction. Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia was the first example of this...") : by authors such as:
- Ursula K. LeGuin ("The Dispossessed, "Always Coming Home")
- Molly Gloss ("The Dazzle of the Day")
- Judith Moffett ("Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream")
- Ernest Callenbach ("Ecotopia")
- Kim Stanley Robinson ("The Wild Shore" and "Pacific Edge")
- Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging
- Kim Stanley Robinson, Three Californias Trilogy.
- Robinson has also edited a collection of short ecotopian fiction, called Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias.
- Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing
- Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home.
- Much of Sheri S. Tepper's work also centers on this theme as well as ecofeminism.
To all these I would add Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA: Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, summarized on the author's website thusly:
After the age of fossil/nuke ... a new era dawned ... Climb aboard our sleek, quiet, supremely comfortable hydrogen-powered "Hairliner" as we fly halfway around an Earth of A.D. 2030 that has mastered the problems of energy and the environment. Beneath us we see a post-industrial world booming with the wealth and harmony of a revolution in green power, one brewing since 1952, but finally in place. Written by one of the world's leading advocates of renewable energy, SOLARTOPIA takes its place with LOOKING BACKWARD and ECOTOPIA in classic visionary thinking. Read this once -- your view of the future will never be the same.
==
19 January 2009 update:
Frank Kaminski wrote in his review of peak- and post-oil novels (linked above) that:
"They are most certainly the vanguard of an entire subgenre of such books, an increasing number of which will be written by veteran speculative fiction authors (assuming, of course, that we have enough energy to keep the presses running). This is not mere speculation; other authors are now waiting to deliver their own unique takes on peak oil. Speculative fiction-short-story-writer Paolo Bacigalupi, for one, clearly seemed quite engaged on the subject during an interview with Locus Magazine this past year."[25]
25 “Paolo Bacigalupi: Facing the Tiger,” Locus, issue 558, vol. 59, no. 1 (July 2007): 76-8.
Indeed, as Annalee Newitz reported:
"Awesome eco-scifi author Paolo Bacigalupi reports that he's just sold an intriguing-sounding dystopian novel to publisher Little, Brown. Bacigalupi writes, "The book in question is Ship Breaker, a young adult novel about all of my favorite things: global warming, peak oil, genetic engineering, poverty and collapsed societies. You know, happy fun stuff. Fortunately, it’s also a ripping adventure. Joe Monti at Little, Brown is the cool guy who decided to buy it, in a two-book deal." Bacigalupi has already published a book of short stories, Pump Six, [No, it has nothing to do with gas stations--P.Z.] and is working on another novel called The Windup Girl. [via Windup Stories]"
Kaminski noted that the peak-oil genre is taking off:
"...Peak oil enthusiasts have indeed begun doing all of these things, as evidenced by the online discussion boards, book reviews, and post-oil short story contests. It will be interesting to see how their debate evolves, as well as how the post-oil novel, and the unlikely partnership between speculative fiction and peak oil, build over time."
A brief search for the abovementioned turned up a story fragment on how not even the Amish are immune to the deprivations wrought by peak oil. There is also an interview with Robert Pogue Ziegler, who won a Rocky Mountain News-sponsored short-story contest with his post-carbon story "Heirlooms."
And Alan Wartes lets out a full-throated "peak oil rallying cry to artists":
"...What we desperately need now are new stories. ...
Artists, we need you. We need your vision and your courage to tell the truth. We’ve got plenty of “analysis,” and enough punditry to last us forever. What we lack are the gut-wrenching stories that put a human face on the collapse that is upon us. We lack imagination to see through the present smoke and dust to what comes next. We lack the icons of this revolution that can sum up the future in a single phrase or image - and suggest what must be done to face it. ...
I offer this small step forward: at So Long, Hydrocarbon Man, we will now take submissions of poems, short films, short stories and images that speak to the realities of peak oil, climate change and life at the end of the era of Hydrocarbon Man. Visit the site and read our submission guidelines. Spread the word to artists: a challenge has been issued to create stories that tell the truth about where we are and ones that imagine the possibilities of where we can go from here. ..."
Alan Wartes is a filmmaker, writer and musician. He writes a blog at www.hydrocarbonman.com,[now defunct--P.Z.] a site that is now taking submissions for art work - short films, poems, short stories and photos - that speaks directly to life at the 'end of the era of Hydrocarbon Man.'"
Kaminski soon revisited the peak-/post-oil novel by reviewing Ill Wind, a book set in a post-oil world but not about peak oil, unlike the novels in his previous review. (In the story, experimental oil-eating microbes set loose on a tanker spill escape to devour the world's petroleum.)
Sunday, May 18, 2008
A Guide to 1980s Decor
This is meant as a guide to avoid eighties decor, but if you like such, the article is full of great tips to recreate that look.
And they like it!
Very much.
This is a reprint of an article on 1980s home decor no longer on Wikipedia. There were several styles as the decade progressed, not just the hard, glitzy looks popular in the early eighties.
And they like it!
Very much.
This is a reprint of an article on 1980s home decor no longer on Wikipedia. There were several styles as the decade progressed, not just the hard, glitzy looks popular in the early eighties.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Monday, May 12, 2008
Kunstler vs. Clinton
I might add pictures later.--P.Z.
May 12, 2008
Monster of Ambition
I was pretty disturbed eight years ago when Hillary Clinton up and announced she was running for a New York seat in the US Senate. Say what? She didn't even live here after she quit Arkansas. Why didn't she run for the single non-voting District of Columbia House of Representatives seat (in a primary against Eleanor Holmes Norton)? Why? Because Hillary is a monster of ambition.
So, Hillary and Bill bought a piece of real estate in Westchester County, NY, and that theoretically qualified her to run for that senate seat. Of course, her move was a huge slap in the face to the 15 million or so adult native New York staters who were also theoretically entitled to run for that office -- including especially the smaller but still substantial number of New Yorkers with serious qualifications. They all rolled over for Hillary, allowing the Clintons to maintain a major power base in American government when the Big Show of Bill's White House tenure was up.
Her run for president took off on schedule with a disturbing sense of inevitability. It was clear that she had internalized the arc of the women's movement to the the degree that the nation owed her a turn in the White House, since this was the logical symbolic destination of the Boomer political ethos: absolute equality above all other considerations -- Hillary gets to play, too! The American public seemed willing to go along with this national psychodrama. It satisfied a certain school days sense of morality. Then Barack Obama had to come along and spoil it all. The nerve of that... uppity Negro!
Or so, apparently, Hillary would have us believe, now that her campaign has run off the rails. In awful desperation she has so much as said that the Democratic party has to nominate her because non-white people are unelectable -- forgetting for a moment that Barack Obama is as much white as he is black.
The spectacle of Hillary's un-making has been pretty horrible to witness, the efforts to stage her as a lumpenprole Nascar mom drinking boilermakers while celebrating her latest hunting exploits. (How worried is Hillary about making her mortgage payments, or filling her gas tank?) Naturally, the final act of this nauseating play takes place in Hillbilly Heaven, the states of West Virginia and Kentucky, where Hillary expects to make a big "statement" about exactly whom voters will go for. She'll win big and the effort will symbolically disgrace her.
She's carrying on now like William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial -- an obvious, gibbering loser unwilling to shut up and go home, even after every measure of consensus from the bailing super delegates to the cover of Time Magazine has made it clear who the preferred party nominee will be.
I hope New York voters will not fail to remember this ghastly final act of the 2008 primary season. I hope a bona fide New Yorker will step up and challenge Mrs Clinton for the senate seat she will return to for the next several years. I hope the Clintons will move offstage and do something else -- enjoy their millions... make even more money... use it to "go green" or something....
Back around the year 2000, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return (despite the two-term limit) as Emperor Bill the 1st. He almost made it. I voted for him twice in the 1990s, but the new script addition wasn't so appetizing. It would have been one of the stranger occurrences in all of modern world history. The political "death" of Hillary and Bill is a story of Shakespearean dimensions. It seems to be ending as farce, though. Who knows, before the day is over, Hillary may yet put on a pair of overalls with one suspender and have her picture taken sucking on a jug of moonshine likker. Of course, irony has been the Boomer's intellectual stock-in-trade.
Whatever America's fate may be in these very trying times of peak oil and climate change, a consensus seems to have formed that we can't afford to leave the same old cast of characters running things.
May 12, 2008
Monster of Ambition
I was pretty disturbed eight years ago when Hillary Clinton up and announced she was running for a New York seat in the US Senate. Say what? She didn't even live here after she quit Arkansas. Why didn't she run for the single non-voting District of Columbia House of Representatives seat (in a primary against Eleanor Holmes Norton)? Why? Because Hillary is a monster of ambition.
So, Hillary and Bill bought a piece of real estate in Westchester County, NY, and that theoretically qualified her to run for that senate seat. Of course, her move was a huge slap in the face to the 15 million or so adult native New York staters who were also theoretically entitled to run for that office -- including especially the smaller but still substantial number of New Yorkers with serious qualifications. They all rolled over for Hillary, allowing the Clintons to maintain a major power base in American government when the Big Show of Bill's White House tenure was up.
Her run for president took off on schedule with a disturbing sense of inevitability. It was clear that she had internalized the arc of the women's movement to the the degree that the nation owed her a turn in the White House, since this was the logical symbolic destination of the Boomer political ethos: absolute equality above all other considerations -- Hillary gets to play, too! The American public seemed willing to go along with this national psychodrama. It satisfied a certain school days sense of morality. Then Barack Obama had to come along and spoil it all. The nerve of that... uppity Negro!
Or so, apparently, Hillary would have us believe, now that her campaign has run off the rails. In awful desperation she has so much as said that the Democratic party has to nominate her because non-white people are unelectable -- forgetting for a moment that Barack Obama is as much white as he is black.
The spectacle of Hillary's un-making has been pretty horrible to witness, the efforts to stage her as a lumpenprole Nascar mom drinking boilermakers while celebrating her latest hunting exploits. (How worried is Hillary about making her mortgage payments, or filling her gas tank?) Naturally, the final act of this nauseating play takes place in Hillbilly Heaven, the states of West Virginia and Kentucky, where Hillary expects to make a big "statement" about exactly whom voters will go for. She'll win big and the effort will symbolically disgrace her.
She's carrying on now like William Jennings Bryan at the Scopes Trial -- an obvious, gibbering loser unwilling to shut up and go home, even after every measure of consensus from the bailing super delegates to the cover of Time Magazine has made it clear who the preferred party nominee will be.
I hope New York voters will not fail to remember this ghastly final act of the 2008 primary season. I hope a bona fide New Yorker will step up and challenge Mrs Clinton for the senate seat she will return to for the next several years. I hope the Clintons will move offstage and do something else -- enjoy their millions... make even more money... use it to "go green" or something....
Back around the year 2000, I used to joke with my friends that Bill Clinton would return (despite the two-term limit) as Emperor Bill the 1st. He almost made it. I voted for him twice in the 1990s, but the new script addition wasn't so appetizing. It would have been one of the stranger occurrences in all of modern world history. The political "death" of Hillary and Bill is a story of Shakespearean dimensions. It seems to be ending as farce, though. Who knows, before the day is over, Hillary may yet put on a pair of overalls with one suspender and have her picture taken sucking on a jug of moonshine likker. Of course, irony has been the Boomer's intellectual stock-in-trade.
Whatever America's fate may be in these very trying times of peak oil and climate change, a consensus seems to have formed that we can't afford to leave the same old cast of characters running things.
Movies and Music
About 9.30 p.m. I found this Counterpunch essay declaring Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay the best film of the Bush era or at least the most subversive. The latter judgement makes more sense to me, as comedies and cartoons (e.g., The Simpsons, South Park) can usually get away with more pointed observations than can documentaries and live-action films, respectively.
I haven't seen it yet, but I just saw Iron Man this afternoon. The 1.45 screening room was packed so we decided to wait an hour in another room for the 3.00 screening. Not much to do for an hour, but I discovered two bands whose songs were playing on Movie Tunes before the movie started. The Red Button's "She's About to Cross My Mind" sounded just like something out of That Thing You Do! And the young jazz chanteuse Rosey proclaimed "It's a Ruse."
On Starz! in Black this evening I watched Holy Man and remembered the first time I heard (and heard of) Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," playing over the ending credits of this movie, so I kept rewinding the tape to hear it. Of course, that song, and so many others, are online now. I found "Summer Soft" (just added to my list of music videos) on YouTube tonight.
I haven't seen it yet, but I just saw Iron Man this afternoon. The 1.45 screening room was packed so we decided to wait an hour in another room for the 3.00 screening. Not much to do for an hour, but I discovered two bands whose songs were playing on Movie Tunes before the movie started. The Red Button's "She's About to Cross My Mind" sounded just like something out of That Thing You Do! And the young jazz chanteuse Rosey proclaimed "It's a Ruse."
On Starz! in Black this evening I watched Holy Man and remembered the first time I heard (and heard of) Stevie Wonder's "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing," playing over the ending credits of this movie, so I kept rewinding the tape to hear it. Of course, that song, and so many others, are online now. I found "Summer Soft" (just added to my list of music videos) on YouTube tonight.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Is College for All? Part Two
Steve Sailer thinks condensed books might do the trick for students.
Earlier, Steve recommended tweaking school reading lists to appeal to more students:
If I were a high school English teacher, I'd welcome condensed versions of books. They'd be less intimidating to students and they'd take up less time in class, so you can move on to other books. All the economic incentives these days are for publishers to churn out thick books in which readers can wallow in their favorite author's writing, but classrooms contain a wide variety of tastes, so a class is better off with more shorter books than fewer longer books.
With lots of older books, you could just cut out the descriptive prose. Before visual images became hyperabundant, people had a hunger for mental imagery. So, as late as "The Maltese Falcon" in 1930, you have to endure two pages of description of what Sam Spade looks like, which turned out to be not at all like Humphrey Bogart -- Hammett's Spade is 6'3" and blond.And lots of fat books have a thin book lurking inside. For example, Tom Wolfe's 426-page The Right Stuff could furnish a terrific 125-page biography of Chuck Yeager.
Earlier, Steve recommended tweaking school reading lists to appeal to more students:
Unfortunately, educators are living in a dreamland about what kind of books are suitable for their lowest-scoring students. Let's take a look at the recommended reading list for high school students (grades 9-12) who rank lowest out of the 13 levels of scores on the test. So, that's like youths in the bottom decile in reading ability, right?Here are five of the 57 recommendations from the bottom of the barrel list:
Collected Poems by W.H. Auden
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw
Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Right Look, at this level, you just want these kids to read something, so you should be recommending, I don't know, 32-page sports hero biographies in big type with lots of pictures. The Da Vinci Code is way too hard for these poor bastards.This seems to be a general pattern, pushing public school kids toward books that are way over their heads.Let's now talk about average public high school students, rather than the bottom 1/13th. For example, Shakespeare is frequently introduced to students via Romeo and Juliet, which is the young Shakespeare at his most show-offy and incomprehensible. You should start instead with Julius Caesar, which is written in Shakespeare's simplest style in imitation of Latin. And it's about war and politics, which boys like, and boys are the problem these days. Most of them probably won't get it, but at least they have a fighting chance with Julius Caesar.For those high school students who go on to a second Shakespeare play, Henry IV, Part I has perhaps the most entertainment value, with war, politics, honor, and some humor that's still kind of funny in Falstaff. Avoid Shakespeare comedies that are based upon transvestism but aren't actually funny, like Twelfth Night. They appeal to a certain type of English teacher, but not to most students. In general, tragedy endures better than comedy.And avoid "problem plays" like Measure for Measure, which are problem plays because they have problems (i.e., aren't very good).If you are building a public high school reading list of classics, you should look for 1) simple, 2) short, and 3) appealing to boys, which means you'd start with The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Is College for All?
Rod Dreher seems to take strange delight in the June Atlantic cover story, "The Sky is Falling":
Vocational education is undervalued, and it's too bad, because in a post-peak oil world, trades such as carpentry will profit people more than, say, currency trading. I'm reminded of this Camille Paglia column, written after the Columbine massacre. She takes on primary and secondary education:
It is always a good day when I get home from work to find a new issue of The Atlantic on the table. Yesterday was especially delish because the cover story is titled "The Sky Is Falling," and it's a Gregg Easterbrook piece on how there are far more killer space rocks than you think lying in wait to strike Earth when we least expect it! Oh frabjous day, Black Swan of Black Swans!
I can see how Alicu is drawn to Rod like a tabby to catnip. And he'll probably pounce on his post (no pun intended).
But the post is really about another piece by an English instructor, who claims that the idea of universal college education "is a destructive myth."
What drives this essay emotionally is not disdain for and disgust with dim-bulb students. X says he really identifies with his students and their struggles in life, and wants to help them along. "I could not be aloof even if I wanted to be," he writes. But he can't compromise academic standards out of pity or solidarity.
What it all boils down to, he says, is that a cruel hoax is being played on these students. "America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting someone's options," he writes. And he sympathizes with this ideal -- but he's the one who has to see how little it has to do with reality. His students aren't college material. They don't read (some of them can't really read). They don't share even the rudiments of a common intellectual culture on which to build. He says he tries to explain the basics of narrative to them in terms of movies, but they haven't all seen the same movies. They are more or less well-mannered, hard-working barbarians. The only thing they all share is a sense that they are good people for being in college, and that they can be anything they want to be.
==Prof. X says the whole system, premised on a false egalitarianism, is to blame here. One key question this excellent essay raises by implication is this: if quite a lot of Americans are incapable of doing college work, what does that do to the Thomas Friedmanesque understanding that in order to compete in a flattened, globalized world, US laborers are simply going to have to get retrained and better educated? What if there are natural limits to their ability to expand their cognitive skills? What then?
I mean, look, what if things were flipped, and the Friedmans of the world were telling the "knowledge workers," for lack of a better term, that staying competitive in this globalizing world economy meant having a stronger back. Ergo, nerdling, you're just going to have to start spending a lot more time at the gym to develop a longshoreman's body, or get left behind. We'd laugh at this, because we have no problem grasping that nature has not endowed all of us equally well in terms of physical strength and capabilities. The nerdling would be able to improve his strength to a certain degree, but to tell him his physical limits are defined only by his desires and will to succeed is to play a cruel hoax on
him.
Are we not doing that with some of the people who are in college now? And furthermore, aren't we shortchanging them when we fail to make allowances for them in the kind of economy we're building? A public schoolteacher friend back in the 1990s railed against free trade agreements because she said these agreements did not consider the interests of US workers who made their living with their hands and backs. It's very easy, it seems to me, for the university-educated meritocratic elite to assume that an economic order in which symbolic analysts are the paradigmatic worker to construct in total innocence a "rational" system that favors their interests, at the expense of manual laborers who are by no means dumb, but whose intelligence is not geared toward academic achievement. Indeed, is that not what we have done?
The supposition that makes that kind of economic order seem just is the belief that cognition, and improving cognitive skills, is simply a matter of running people through a diploma mill -- and the conviction that anybody who wants to succeed in school
badly enough can. Again, this is what you get when those who have been genetically blessed with cognitive capability -- intelligence, in other words -- don't grasp how unearned their advantages are. You get what Gov. Ann Richards, I think it was, said of George H.W. Bush: "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."Understand I'm not making excuses for mediocrity. Plainly there are people who are capable of succeeding in the classroom, but who don't because they lack focus, self-discipline or initiative. What I'm talking about is the taboo we have against admitting that some people are smarter than others, and the contemporary American disdain for the dignity of manual labor, and the gnostic egalitarianism of US culture, which holds that we create our own realities by force of will.
This ideology allows those who have the cognitive abilities to succeed in a meritocratic, information-age economy to disavow social responsibility for those who are not as gifted. This is not to say that the ungifted are to be objects of pity, nor is it to say that they have no responsibility at all for themselves. It is simply, I think, to realize that our ideology prevents us from acknowledging certain truths about the way the world is, and ordering our system around reality, not false idealism that ends up breaking people like Ms. L, and turning people like Prof. X into cynics.
Vocational education is undervalued, and it's too bad, because in a post-peak oil world, trades such as carpentry will profit people more than, say, currency trading. I'm reminded of this Camille Paglia column, written after the Columbine massacre. She takes on primary and secondary education:
These shocking incidents of school violence are ultimately rooted in the massive social breakdown of the Industrial Revolution, which disrupted the ancient patterns of clan and community. Our middle-class culture is affluent but spiritually empty. The attractive houses of the Columbine killers are mere shells, seething with the poisons of the isolated nuclear family and its Byzantine denials. ...
For me, the lesson of Columbine is that primary and secondary education, as it gradually expanded over the past century, has massive systemic problems. We are warehousing students from childhood to early adulthood, channeling them toward middle-class professional jobs that they may or may not want. [And that will almost totally dry up in the Long Emergency--P.Z.] Young, male, hormonally driven energy is trapped and stultified by school, with its sterile regimentation into cubical classrooms and cramped rows of seats. ...Today's busy, busy, busy high school education seems to prepare young people for nothing. There are too many posh cars in the parking lot and too much stress on extracurricular activities. Just as I have argued for lowering the age of sexual consent to 14, so do I now propose that young people be allowed to leave school at 14 -- as they did during the immigrant era, when families needed every wage to survive. Unfortunately, in our service-sector economy, entry-level manual labor is no longer widely available.
At home, American teenagers are being simultaneously babied and neglected, while at school they have become, in effect, prisoners of the state. Primary school should be stripped down to the bare bones of grammar, art, history, math and science. We need to offer optional vocational and technical schools geared to concrete training in a craft or trade. Practical, skills-based knowledge gives students a sense of mastery, even if they don't stay in that profession. A wide range of careers might be pedagogically developed, such as horticulture and landscape design; house construction and outfitting; automotive and aviation mechanics; restaurant culinary arts; banking, accounting,
investment and small business management.
The mental energy presently being recreationally diverted by teens to the Internet and to violent video games (one of the last arenas for masculine action, however imaginary) is clearly not being absorbed by school. We have a gigantic educational assembly line that coercively processes students and treats them with Ritalin or therapy if they can't sit still in the cage. The American high school as social scene clearly spawns internecine furies in sexually stunted young men -- who are emotionally divorced from their parents but too passive to run away, so that they turn their inchoate family hatreds on their peers. Like the brainy rich-kid criminals Leopold and Loeb (see the 1959 film "Compulsion"), the Columbine killers were looking for meaning and chose the immortality of infamy, the cold ninth circle of the damned.
Monday, May 05, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Helmut Krone
I found this while searching for information on the late-sixties sports magazine Jock, my interest having been piqued by a recent post on Alicublog.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Monday, April 14, 2008
Kunstler's Tongue Lashing
I've heard about Obama's 'bitter' comment only in passing. If voters' delicate sensibilities can be bruised by his phrasing, imagine how Kunstler's latest (reposted below in full) could pulverise them. The especially fiery parts are bolded.
April 14, 2008
Slip of the Tongue
Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.
The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between. As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.
This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they're persecuted for it).
A President Hillary will also go a long way to defeating the popular delusion that a world ruled by female humans would be heaven-on-earth. (It would be more like one of those chaotic single-parent households in Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and distracted mom, with a shadowy man in the background molesting the little ones while she was off working at the WalMart.) I'm very sorry that Barack Obama apologized for his remarks. It compromised his authority. They were truthful and correct. He might have added that the anxious and bitter lower classes were also neurotically hung-up on cars, and that his first act as president would be to shut down the Nascar tracks by executive order in the interest of national energy security.
It's been illuminating to see how almost nobody has come to Obama's defense in this matter -- hardly anyone in the press, anyway. It shows what the mainstream media's interest in the truth is (close to zero). In the background of these sad and sordid campaign doings, the financial sector -- and the dog's-body economy that the wagging financial tail used to be attached to -- is whirling steadily down a big wide culvert, along with the rest of the debris shaken loose by the spring rains. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd have been putting together mortgage rescue schemes that are gut-bustingly hilarious because they don't seem to take into account the basic fact that nobody knows who the lending parties to all those distressed mortgages really are. (Hint: they're not the "servicing" companies who send out the default notices.) So when they say that the government will "negotiate down" the principal owed on a house hemorrhaging dollar value, who exactly did they have in mind as the negotiating partner?
These are issues that would, in a more mentally-healthy republic, occupy center stage of the political conversation -- not whether a cohort of Cheez Doodle addicted rural Pennsylvania morons prays out loud for God to shoot all the Mexicans.
April 14, 2008
Slip of the Tongue
Barack Obama caught hell last week for daring to tell the truth about the ragged thing that the American spirit has become. He said that small-town Pennsylvania voters, bitter over their economic circumstances, “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” to work out their negative emotions. He might have added that the Pope wears a funny hat (see for yourself this week), and that bears shit in the woods (something rural Pennsylvanians probably know). Nevertheless, in the manner lately prescribed for those who slip up and speak truthfully in public (and in contradiction to the reigning delusions), Obama was pressured to apologize for his statements.
The evermore loathsome and odious Hillary Clinton, co-owner of a $100 million personal wealth portfolio, seized the moment to remind voters what a normal, everyday gal she is -- who would never look down on the small-town folk of Pennsylvania the way her "elitist" opponent had -- forgetting, apparently, that the Clinton family's consigliere, James Carville, famously described the Keystone State as a kind of redneck sandwich with Pittsburgh and Philadelphia as the bread, and Alabama as the lunch meat in between. As I mull over all this, I begin to think that Hillary is exactly what the USA deserves and, that should she manage to winkle away the nomination and get elected president, the outcome would be instructive and salutary. For one thing, she will be buried under an avalanche of political woe, beginning with the basic financial insolvency of everything in the nation except the Clinton family. Then she would proceed straight into an oil-and-gas clusterfuck that could take this society back to the eighteenth century economically.
This would have the positive effect of forcing the American public to look elsewhere for governance than the usual parties in Washington, D.C. It's time for a national purgative, anyway. In fact, it's way overdue. Are the Democratic and Republican parties anymore necessary than the Whigs? Neither of them can really articulate the problems we face (and when their honchos slip up and come close to the truth, they're persecuted for it).
A President Hillary will also go a long way to defeating the popular delusion that a world ruled by female humans would be heaven-on-earth. (It would be more like one of those chaotic single-parent households in Section-8 housing, ruled by a harried and distracted mom, with a shadowy man in the background molesting the little ones while she was off working at the WalMart.) I'm very sorry that Barack Obama apologized for his remarks. It compromised his authority. They were truthful and correct. He might have added that the anxious and bitter lower classes were also neurotically hung-up on cars, and that his first act as president would be to shut down the Nascar tracks by executive order in the interest of national energy security.
It's been illuminating to see how almost nobody has come to Obama's defense in this matter -- hardly anyone in the press, anyway. It shows what the mainstream media's interest in the truth is (close to zero). In the background of these sad and sordid campaign doings, the financial sector -- and the dog's-body economy that the wagging financial tail used to be attached to -- is whirling steadily down a big wide culvert, along with the rest of the debris shaken loose by the spring rains. Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chris Dodd have been putting together mortgage rescue schemes that are gut-bustingly hilarious because they don't seem to take into account the basic fact that nobody knows who the lending parties to all those distressed mortgages really are. (Hint: they're not the "servicing" companies who send out the default notices.) So when they say that the government will "negotiate down" the principal owed on a house hemorrhaging dollar value, who exactly did they have in mind as the negotiating partner?
These are issues that would, in a more mentally-healthy republic, occupy center stage of the political conversation -- not whether a cohort of Cheez Doodle addicted rural Pennsylvania morons prays out loud for God to shoot all the Mexicans.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Lookalikes
Despite her liking pearls and her flip hairdo, Michelle Obama doesn't remind me of Jackie Kennedy. Then I realised she really looks much like Amy Poehler, especially about the eyes.Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Monday, April 07, 2008
Higa's Sex Scandal Costs Taxpayers and Might Cost Him His Campaign
Update: One of Hunter's respondents thinks Stacy Higa resembles Fat Bastard, nemesis of Austin Powers. Perhaps in girth, but otherwise I don't see it.
Friday, April 04, 2008
Corn Prices Rise
The rising price of corn is attributed to increased demand worldwide (food, livestock feed, and ethanol) and lowered supply, i.e., farmers cultivating less of the crop.
This explains why farmers have not grown enough corn to meet demand. At the moment wheat and soybeans are more lucrative.
My initial take on this news: Corn and its derivatives (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup version) are used to make everything from soda to plastics. Consequently, the price of corn-derived materials will rise. Try to avoid as much as possible foods with HFCS, especially soda and snacks. If you're inclined, grow your own corn. For example, popcorn. A nice array of popcorn and other corn seeds can be found here.
This explains why farmers have not grown enough corn to meet demand. At the moment wheat and soybeans are more lucrative.
My initial take on this news: Corn and its derivatives (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup version) are used to make everything from soda to plastics. Consequently, the price of corn-derived materials will rise. Try to avoid as much as possible foods with HFCS, especially soda and snacks. If you're inclined, grow your own corn. For example, popcorn. A nice array of popcorn and other corn seeds can be found here.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Lacrosse and Wall Street Revisited
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120718315926985109.html?mod=fpa_mostpop
See also this article I linked to last September.
See also this article I linked to last September.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Monday, March 31, 2008
The Airlines Are Dying, Says Kunstler
March 31, 2008
The airlines are dying.It was not a good week to be at the mercy of America's floundering air travel program. The price of aviation fuel is killing them. They can't fire any more employees or shed anymore pension obligations. There is no elasticity left in the system. Coming back from Denver yesterday, the chaos at the concourse gates was impressive. Nobody knew when or if a given flight would board, and they certainly didn't post any realistic information on the high-def screens at every gate. When asked for updates, the harried gate agents could offer none. So much for computer wizardry. It is interesting to see how passively the public accepts this. For now, they slump like war refugees in the blow-molded plastic seats, numb with fatigue, anxiety, and disappointment. But I wonder if there will be riots in the concourses sometime later this year.
==
Aloha Airlines (est. 1946) will cease its passenger services after today.
Update: But the Zeppelins are coming!
3 April update: ATA Airlines comes in for a permanent landing.
The airlines are dying.It was not a good week to be at the mercy of America's floundering air travel program. The price of aviation fuel is killing them. They can't fire any more employees or shed anymore pension obligations. There is no elasticity left in the system. Coming back from Denver yesterday, the chaos at the concourse gates was impressive. Nobody knew when or if a given flight would board, and they certainly didn't post any realistic information on the high-def screens at every gate. When asked for updates, the harried gate agents could offer none. So much for computer wizardry. It is interesting to see how passively the public accepts this. For now, they slump like war refugees in the blow-molded plastic seats, numb with fatigue, anxiety, and disappointment. But I wonder if there will be riots in the concourses sometime later this year.
==
Aloha Airlines (est. 1946) will cease its passenger services after today.
Update: But the Zeppelins are coming!
3 April update: ATA Airlines comes in for a permanent landing.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
World Made by Hand
I've been reading James Kunstler's novel World Made by Hand. I plan to review it here soon, perhaps in tandem with another new purchase of mine, Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture (New York: Collins, 2007).
For now, I can say it's a very good read, but not quite what I had pictured. I'd intentionally avoided reading any reviews of the book before buying it so that any surprises wouldn't be spoiled.
For now, I can say it's a very good read, but not quite what I had pictured. I'd intentionally avoided reading any reviews of the book before buying it so that any surprises wouldn't be spoiled.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Have Cars Outlived Their Usefulness?
Today's Counterpunch has a commentary by Adam Federman on the automobile
From Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road
By ADAM FEDERMAN
Like the horse and buggy one hundred years ago, the automobile is no longer viewed so favorably as a means of getting around. It is regarded as nearly as foul and smelly as the horses that at the turn of the century deposited some 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine on the streets of New York. In addition to their own waste, horses died and had to be disposed of, posing a significant public health risk. Approximately 15,000 dead horses were removed from the streets of New York each year.
Thus when the car was developed and Henry Ford figured out how to mass- produce them so that more and more Americans could have one, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing. (That is not to say it was embraced immediately or without skepticism. There was, in fact, much resistance to the automobile initially and according to Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, “Equestrians, pedestrians, and carriage riders alike complained that the foul-smelling, noisy cars frightened horses, disrupted the decorum of the carriage parade, and ruined their own retreat to nature.”) We would all be masters of our own universe. No more manure, no more urine, and no more dead horses. But like many improvements, technological or otherwise the automobile has outlived its golden age and is now viewed as a menace, a destructive force responsible for our polluted skies, our crowded streets, and our dystopian suburban landscape, ever widening into mega-regions that connect cities and suburbs in a kind of galactic sprawl.
Just as it was once hailed as a symbol of freedom, mobility, and the future the car is now a symbol of excess (the SUV), entrapment (as embodied by the hours long commute or traffic jam), and the past. Today we criticize India and China for their own auto craze as if they’re living through a historical period that has already passed. And in the enlightened West we’re buying green cars and trying to reconcile our lifestyles with a desire to drive guilt free.
We live in a world dominated by the automobile. The Texas Transportation Institute’s 2007 Urban Mobility Report, which notes that the nationwide cost of traffic congestion is $78 billion, opens ominously with the observation that congestion is “getting worse in regions of all sizes.” And not only in the first world. Although the number of cars per capita in India and China remains far smaller than that of America, it is growing. According to Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, “Assuming that incomes continue to rise, in a few years tens of millions of families [in India and China] will be buying their first cars, and eventually hundreds of millions.” It is projected that by 2020 nearly half of the world’s 1.3 billion cars will clog the streets of poorer countries.
...
Adam Federman can be reached at: mailto:adamfederman@mac.com
I'll have more on this later.
From Autopia to Autogeddon: Cars Reach the End of the Road
By ADAM FEDERMAN
Like the horse and buggy one hundred years ago, the automobile is no longer viewed so favorably as a means of getting around. It is regarded as nearly as foul and smelly as the horses that at the turn of the century deposited some 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine on the streets of New York. In addition to their own waste, horses died and had to be disposed of, posing a significant public health risk. Approximately 15,000 dead horses were removed from the streets of New York each year.
Thus when the car was developed and Henry Ford figured out how to mass- produce them so that more and more Americans could have one, it didn’t seem like such a bad thing. (That is not to say it was embraced immediately or without skepticism. There was, in fact, much resistance to the automobile initially and according to Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, “Equestrians, pedestrians, and carriage riders alike complained that the foul-smelling, noisy cars frightened horses, disrupted the decorum of the carriage parade, and ruined their own retreat to nature.”) We would all be masters of our own universe. No more manure, no more urine, and no more dead horses. But like many improvements, technological or otherwise the automobile has outlived its golden age and is now viewed as a menace, a destructive force responsible for our polluted skies, our crowded streets, and our dystopian suburban landscape, ever widening into mega-regions that connect cities and suburbs in a kind of galactic sprawl.
Just as it was once hailed as a symbol of freedom, mobility, and the future the car is now a symbol of excess (the SUV), entrapment (as embodied by the hours long commute or traffic jam), and the past. Today we criticize India and China for their own auto craze as if they’re living through a historical period that has already passed. And in the enlightened West we’re buying green cars and trying to reconcile our lifestyles with a desire to drive guilt free.
We live in a world dominated by the automobile. The Texas Transportation Institute’s 2007 Urban Mobility Report, which notes that the nationwide cost of traffic congestion is $78 billion, opens ominously with the observation that congestion is “getting worse in regions of all sizes.” And not only in the first world. Although the number of cars per capita in India and China remains far smaller than that of America, it is growing. According to Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker, “Assuming that incomes continue to rise, in a few years tens of millions of families [in India and China] will be buying their first cars, and eventually hundreds of millions.” It is projected that by 2020 nearly half of the world’s 1.3 billion cars will clog the streets of poorer countries.
...
Adam Federman can be reached at: mailto:adamfederman@mac.com
I'll have more on this later.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Kunstler Takes on Krugman
March 10, 2008
Going Going....
The feigned cluelessness in Paul Krugman's Sunday New York Times column ("The Face-Slap Theory") about the meltdown in finance is a good index of the cringing mendacity now emanating from those in service to the centers of power. I doubt an editor, or the publisher, Mr. Sulzberger, had to whisper in his ear to soft-pedal the situation. I don't even believe anything like his job depends on it. Krugman's glossing-over the truth is just social cowardice. He doesn't want to be called out dissing fellow members of his club.
Krugman avers to the Federal Reserve's two previous big efforts since August to bail out the insolvent banks, insurers, and hedge funds with cheap loans as "slaps in the faces" of these wobbling corporations -- "yo, wake the fuck up!" -- as if narcolepsy was their only problem. (Try that with a wino on the sidewalk outside the Port Authority bus terminal and see if he immediately signs up for rehab and a high school equivalency program.) Krugman calls the club's latest plan -- for the Fed to just suck up their impaired and worthless collateral in exchange for more cheap loans -- as a "third slap," saying, with all the panache of a midwestern Rotary Club secretary, that "the third time could be the charm." Had the monkeys already flown out of his butt as he wrote that, I wonder.
The line in Krugman's column I love best, though is this one: "Last month another market you’ve never heard of, the $300 billion market for auction-rate securities (don’t ask), suffered the equivalent of a bank run." His presumes that his readers go along with his pretense of innocence. We've never heard of the municipal bond market and it's too complicated to explain so "don't ask." Is he writing for the "newspaper of record" or Highlights For Children? Maybe it would be a good thing if readers of The New York Times asked what the fuck was going on in these markets so they could yank their depreciating dollars out and deploy them elsewhere or convert them into something of value.
Well it was a bad week on the money scene in what is sure to be a worsening year. Paul Krugman and his fellow club members can pretend that the hallucinated finance economy is not really flying to pieces. After all, he / they are trying to avert panic. But, as noted previously in this space, the only thing we have to fear is not fear itself. We have to fear the consequences of actions by a banking leadership that has shown the grossest irresponsibility (and an American public that has been conditioned to expect a steady diet of getting something for nothing). The US faces a pretty stark choice right now: it can let the losers take their losses -- both the big institutions who created and traded in fraudulent securities, and all the "little guys" who borrowed too much money trying to get rich quick, or trying to live like the millionaires they see on TV. We can let them go down, and suffer the consequences of their bad choices (and maybe prosecute some of the culpable bankers and corporate executives), OR, in an effort to let these losers off the hook we can wreck the whole machinery of capital by making our medium-of-exchange worthless.
The people in charge -- both in and out of government -- can't face the losses, so for now they've apparently decided to wreck the currency. The dollar has lost two percent of its value against the Euro just in recent weeks, as cheap loans from the Fed pour into the black hole on Wall Street (never to be seen again). Other soft-pedalers in the media claim that the financial markets have "already priced in" yet another expected .75-point interest rate drop by the Fed this week, but I'm confident that such a move will only accelerate the dollar's vanishing act.
I'll admit, it's hard to believe what's going on in the American finance sector. But incredulity in the face of a rare catastrophe isn't the same as pretending that it's not happening. A whole flock of black swans is flying in front of the sun. Don't expect to work on your tan this month.
Going Going....
The feigned cluelessness in Paul Krugman's Sunday New York Times column ("The Face-Slap Theory") about the meltdown in finance is a good index of the cringing mendacity now emanating from those in service to the centers of power. I doubt an editor, or the publisher, Mr. Sulzberger, had to whisper in his ear to soft-pedal the situation. I don't even believe anything like his job depends on it. Krugman's glossing-over the truth is just social cowardice. He doesn't want to be called out dissing fellow members of his club.
Krugman avers to the Federal Reserve's two previous big efforts since August to bail out the insolvent banks, insurers, and hedge funds with cheap loans as "slaps in the faces" of these wobbling corporations -- "yo, wake the fuck up!" -- as if narcolepsy was their only problem. (Try that with a wino on the sidewalk outside the Port Authority bus terminal and see if he immediately signs up for rehab and a high school equivalency program.) Krugman calls the club's latest plan -- for the Fed to just suck up their impaired and worthless collateral in exchange for more cheap loans -- as a "third slap," saying, with all the panache of a midwestern Rotary Club secretary, that "the third time could be the charm." Had the monkeys already flown out of his butt as he wrote that, I wonder.
The line in Krugman's column I love best, though is this one: "Last month another market you’ve never heard of, the $300 billion market for auction-rate securities (don’t ask), suffered the equivalent of a bank run." His presumes that his readers go along with his pretense of innocence. We've never heard of the municipal bond market and it's too complicated to explain so "don't ask." Is he writing for the "newspaper of record" or Highlights For Children? Maybe it would be a good thing if readers of The New York Times asked what the fuck was going on in these markets so they could yank their depreciating dollars out and deploy them elsewhere or convert them into something of value.
Well it was a bad week on the money scene in what is sure to be a worsening year. Paul Krugman and his fellow club members can pretend that the hallucinated finance economy is not really flying to pieces. After all, he / they are trying to avert panic. But, as noted previously in this space, the only thing we have to fear is not fear itself. We have to fear the consequences of actions by a banking leadership that has shown the grossest irresponsibility (and an American public that has been conditioned to expect a steady diet of getting something for nothing). The US faces a pretty stark choice right now: it can let the losers take their losses -- both the big institutions who created and traded in fraudulent securities, and all the "little guys" who borrowed too much money trying to get rich quick, or trying to live like the millionaires they see on TV. We can let them go down, and suffer the consequences of their bad choices (and maybe prosecute some of the culpable bankers and corporate executives), OR, in an effort to let these losers off the hook we can wreck the whole machinery of capital by making our medium-of-exchange worthless.
The people in charge -- both in and out of government -- can't face the losses, so for now they've apparently decided to wreck the currency. The dollar has lost two percent of its value against the Euro just in recent weeks, as cheap loans from the Fed pour into the black hole on Wall Street (never to be seen again). Other soft-pedalers in the media claim that the financial markets have "already priced in" yet another expected .75-point interest rate drop by the Fed this week, but I'm confident that such a move will only accelerate the dollar's vanishing act.
I'll admit, it's hard to believe what's going on in the American finance sector. But incredulity in the face of a rare catastrophe isn't the same as pretending that it's not happening. A whole flock of black swans is flying in front of the sun. Don't expect to work on your tan this month.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
William F. Buckley est Mort
Here.
28 February update: Selected commentary on Bill Buckley's legacy:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/westley/westley26.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2008/02/given-the-melli.html
http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2008/02/talk-radio-mourns-passing-of-william-f.html
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/02/bill-buckley-was-a-good-man.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/019662.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/019644.html
The CIA agent, founder of the modern conservative movement, enforcer of warfare-state discipline on the right, brilliant writer and editor, transoceanic sailor, harpsichordist, TV star, charming aristocrat, founder of National Review and Young Americans for Freedom, enabler of neoconservatism, expeller of heretics from Birchers to Rothbardians, and thoroughly bad ideological influence in general, is dead at 82.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=291671
http://leagueofthesouth.net/rebellion/index.php/site/buckley_bush_not_a_true_conservative/
29 February update: James Wolcott links to Dennis Perrin, who doesn't hesitate to speak ill of the dead.
Rich Lowry's retrospective on Buckley, originally from a 2004 issue of National Review.
Lew Rockwell and company have many posts on Buckley, diverging greatly from the standard line that Buckley was the saviour of modern conservatism. Below, a choice example:
Buckley's Tainted Coup
Posted by Lew Rockwell at February 29, 2008 10:44 AM
Writes Kevin Griffin: "William F. Buckley, Jr., was a favorite among 'liberals' (albeit, not classical liberals) because he purged the conservative movement of their nemeses: the Original Rightists. Buckley was the prototypical Big-Government conservative, i.e., the Cold War Democrats' Republican. His 'New Right' movement has since been augmented by the statist force of the neoconservatives. Thus, behold the end result of Buckley's tainted coup: John Sidney McCain III."
And a McCainite praises Buckley:
When he founded National Review more than 50 years ago (and to me, it does seem like only yesterday), conservatism looked like a dead philosophy. Prior to World War II, the dominant Republican philosophy on foreign policy was isolationism. In fiscal affairs, Republicans -- well, most of them -- were in favor of a balanced budget, something that was unlikely during World War II and in the subsequent Cold War.
Buckley's conservatism contained a strong element of traditional Roman Catholicism, although with a deep suspicion of Rooseveltian governmental intervention in people's affairs. Most of all, Buckley was opposed to collectivism, the dominant viewpoint underlying Communism, which appeared at the time to be the main competitor for mankind's hearts and minds.
1 March update: Cockburn weighs in.
17 March update: Grant Jones's Dougout posts Edward Cline's good-riddance.
28 February update: Selected commentary on Bill Buckley's legacy:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/westley/westley26.html
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/blogs/wolcott/2008/02/given-the-melli.html
http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2008/02/talk-radio-mourns-passing-of-william-f.html
http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/2008/02/bill-buckley-was-a-good-man.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/019662.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/019644.html
The CIA agent, founder of the modern conservative movement, enforcer of warfare-state discipline on the right, brilliant writer and editor, transoceanic sailor, harpsichordist, TV star, charming aristocrat, founder of National Review and Young Americans for Freedom, enabler of neoconservatism, expeller of heretics from Birchers to Rothbardians, and thoroughly bad ideological influence in general, is dead at 82.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat?pid=291671
http://leagueofthesouth.net/rebellion/index.php/site/buckley_bush_not_a_true_conservative/
29 February update: James Wolcott links to Dennis Perrin, who doesn't hesitate to speak ill of the dead.
Rich Lowry's retrospective on Buckley, originally from a 2004 issue of National Review.
Lew Rockwell and company have many posts on Buckley, diverging greatly from the standard line that Buckley was the saviour of modern conservatism. Below, a choice example:
Buckley's Tainted Coup
Posted by Lew Rockwell at February 29, 2008 10:44 AM
Writes Kevin Griffin: "William F. Buckley, Jr., was a favorite among 'liberals' (albeit, not classical liberals) because he purged the conservative movement of their nemeses: the Original Rightists. Buckley was the prototypical Big-Government conservative, i.e., the Cold War Democrats' Republican. His 'New Right' movement has since been augmented by the statist force of the neoconservatives. Thus, behold the end result of Buckley's tainted coup: John Sidney McCain III."
And a McCainite praises Buckley:
When he founded National Review more than 50 years ago (and to me, it does seem like only yesterday), conservatism looked like a dead philosophy. Prior to World War II, the dominant Republican philosophy on foreign policy was isolationism. In fiscal affairs, Republicans -- well, most of them -- were in favor of a balanced budget, something that was unlikely during World War II and in the subsequent Cold War.
Buckley's conservatism contained a strong element of traditional Roman Catholicism, although with a deep suspicion of Rooseveltian governmental intervention in people's affairs. Most of all, Buckley was opposed to collectivism, the dominant viewpoint underlying Communism, which appeared at the time to be the main competitor for mankind's hearts and minds.
1 March update: Cockburn weighs in.
17 March update: Grant Jones's Dougout posts Edward Cline's good-riddance.
Monday, February 25, 2008
The Nutty CEO
Kunstler's latest Grunt takes on overly optimistic claims that airplanes can run on palm-oil derived biofuel. I've heard of the coconut wireless, and coconut radio, but coconut airplanes?
February 25, 2008
Blowing More Green Smoke Up Our Own Ass
Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson announced the beginning of "green" air travel with great fanfare over the weekend by flying a big Airbus jet plane on a combination of coconut and palm oil derived fuel. Now the public is supposed to rest assured that the airline industry has been "saved" by "new technology." It's possible that Branson actually believes this bullshit -- since, contrary to conventional belief, you don't have to be especially intelligent to succeed in business. But the public is sure to be disappointed as reality asserts itself and they discover that the stunt doesn't scale world-wide. That is, sure, you can demonstrate that "a" jet plane can fly on bio-fuel. But can you run the entire global airline fleet on coconut and palm oil, or even a fraction of it? Of course not -- unless you cut down the entire Amazon rain forest and replant it with oil tree crops. Not to mention that the CO2 emissions spraying out of bio-fuel jets at 38,000 feet is not materially different from regular jet fuel exhaust. This is just another tragic attempt to persuade ourselves that we don't have to change our behavior.
===
This Guardian article is also skeptical:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/25/biofuels.theairlineindustry?gusrc=rss&feed=media
February 25, 2008
Blowing More Green Smoke Up Our Own Ass
Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson announced the beginning of "green" air travel with great fanfare over the weekend by flying a big Airbus jet plane on a combination of coconut and palm oil derived fuel. Now the public is supposed to rest assured that the airline industry has been "saved" by "new technology." It's possible that Branson actually believes this bullshit -- since, contrary to conventional belief, you don't have to be especially intelligent to succeed in business. But the public is sure to be disappointed as reality asserts itself and they discover that the stunt doesn't scale world-wide. That is, sure, you can demonstrate that "a" jet plane can fly on bio-fuel. But can you run the entire global airline fleet on coconut and palm oil, or even a fraction of it? Of course not -- unless you cut down the entire Amazon rain forest and replant it with oil tree crops. Not to mention that the CO2 emissions spraying out of bio-fuel jets at 38,000 feet is not materially different from regular jet fuel exhaust. This is just another tragic attempt to persuade ourselves that we don't have to change our behavior.
===
This Guardian article is also skeptical:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/feb/25/biofuels.theairlineindustry?gusrc=rss&feed=media
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Peak Oil Apocalypse
From a British nationalist perspective. The scenario laid out is in ways much bleaker than Kunstler's predictions. But there are opportunities to survive and even prosper in a post-oil age.
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Long Emergency in South Africa
February 4, 2008:
I got a letter from a lady in South Africa:
"I am watching South Africa with an eye on what, when and how the global trends contributing to your Long Emergency will start taking effect. But the government here, together with some outside influences of the stock market, have plunged South Africa into the Premature Long Emergency. It has only been a couple of weeks, but the country is in dire straits. . . ."
...
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_SouthAfrica.html
SOUTH AFRICA IN THE PREMATURE LONG EMERGENCY
February 4, 2008
It began with a few potholes in the roads, the odd interruption to the water supply in the suburbs, a couple of days with strike action preventing the delivery of municipal services – no garbage collection, protest action disrupting the mining industry and picketing & toy toying at shopping malls…It continued over the next couple of years, largely with disregard for the disruptions, a little irritation to daily commercial and home life by the lack of service provision in food, gas, water and power. In recent months, at the receivables end of the supply chain, there was a little aggravation at the delays, the lack of service, the shortage of a few consumer luxuries in the retail shops…, ‘but hey, what the hell, this is a great country, we cannot fault the lifestyle, the weather…’. For a couple of months, perhaps a year back or so, there seemed little or no reason to change our way of life, our lifestyles…a little further down the road and the disruptions become more frequent, we learn to cope, learn to accept the rising cost of living, gas supply shortages in the Winter of 2007, the intermittent water disruptions, the odd power outage and the potholes. Potholes may well be the singular measure of the calamity we are in or about to face. We accept the transitions in South Africa, but it is all very well passing over these problems in the name of development, infrastructure development, greater housing plans and urbanization as a promised deliverable by the ANC government, together with the balancing of the wealth quotient. Access to finance and the shift of the material wealth are an indication of the success of the plans for economic growth in the New South Africa. So, there have been interesting times, a few PDI’s (previously disadvantaged individuals), through black economic empowerment, becoming significantly enriched through commerce and business and, dare I say, politics. But the cracks that are now evident are tell tails signs, not only of the effectivity of the New South Africa and an explanation of the path traveled to this point in time, but more of what is promised for the future. And the future may be more a by product of global issues than issues unique and unfortunate to South Africa.
So what do we have at hand, what are the reactions and what are the consequences??? South Africa has been flung full tilt into a Premature Long Emergency. In the up market suburbs, not least to say generally all over the urban landscape, there is not a 1km (1/2 mile) strip of tarred road that is not full of potholes (hugh gapping holes, across which vehicles cannot drive), the roadside curbs are disintegrating, the road maintenance programmes over the last 10 years have failed to maintain the roads in a serviceable and passable state. The nation is gripped in a crisis of rolling power outages caused by the incompetence of highly paid government ministers and their charges. The news of the weekend is that the nation is in dire straits with the supply of clean, drinkable water to households and business alike. We are faced with unusual weather patterns, floods at the moment, high rain fall for the Summer, the expectation of an early, long cold Winter.
THE POWER EMERGENCY
The rolling power outages are resulting in about a 25% national power outage per month. The ramifications of this can be related directly to an income loss of the same amount, retail supplies are being interrupted and from a security point of view it is dangerous to shop in malls. The Electricity Supply Commission – ESKOM are indicating a forced reduction on power usage by 10%, further, the mines have been told not to work on Fridays. There are revenue and cost implications here that extend beyond the obvious monthly figures. What of the power saving measures that may in turn lead to greater problems, the mines are unable to pump excess ground water from the shafts, the maintenance programmes are due to suffer. And what of the safety indications, miners are protesting the possibility of being caught under ground or in lift shafts as the random power cuts hit the service grids. It is not only that ESKOM have not maintained or expanded their operations in the last 15 years, but the next big whammy is that there is no coal to keep the power stations running…at most times, there is a couple of months supply of coal onsite for electricity operations, today there is hardly a few days supply. Incidentally the reason given for this catastrophe is that the trucks delivering the coal have been unable to get to the power stations as the road infrastructure has deteriorated- potholes again. In the Afrikaans language: ‘slaggate’ – a direct translation to ‘slaughter holes’. As this is written, we wait for the next couple of days to see the effect of the ‘coal emergency’.
THE WATER EMERGENCY
At some point the effect of the power emergency on water and sanitation supply should be considered and this would be part of the roll out of unexpected events resultant of the collapse of the power supply, but the water board have usurped the power supply with homegrown problems of their own…
So here we have it, 43% of the dams have safety problems and are in danger of collapsing. Further to this, the ground water in Gauteng, the province of Johannesburg, has radioactive contamination from mining operations. Now, as a matter of interest, Johannesburg is one of the few cities in the world that is built on a hill and water has to be pumped up into the city!!!
THE FROG IN THE POT
And what of the peoples reaction? Complacency does not even come close, the nation is either brain dead or ignorant, or just plain ‘frog in a pot’ of water with the temperature rising. The first reaction to the power emergency took the form of a rush for candles, refilling of gas bottles and the purchasing of generators (if you could get them). Then the complacency set it, business learnt to sit through power outages, retail shops were forced to close their doors for a few hours a day. There was and is a shortage of food supplies, food went bad in the fridges and had to been thrown away. It was kind of charming in a strange kind of way, to eat dinner by candle light and forgo the ‘soapies’ on TV. Traffic lights were out over a large number of suburbs and delays in getting to business meetings became the norm. The schools are unable to teach a full day’s lesson. The internet service providers and the mobile phone companies’ frequently have service delays or are just plain ‘off line’. The battery runs out on your laptop and that’s the days productive work is over until the power is back on…Patients in ICU or undergoing operations, as the power grid went down, were at risk of and did, die.
As we head into February, it will be interesting to see the economic figures; theoretically the revenue generation for the period should be down by at least 25% or something similar to the power outage percentages. Notwithstanding that the stock market took a bend downwards and followed the USA crash and the antics of the Societé General rogue trader. (Well done on the foresight, James). The South African property market is following suit, as well. And just as we were wondering how the effect, implications and opinions of an emergency would pan out into daily life, what the tell tail signs would be… it happened, all of this is the short space of about 2-3 weeks, the realization dawns that it has begun, the country is experiencing and living through the beginning of the Long Emergency, rather unexpectedly and certainly too prematurely. I proffer that the events in South Africa, tragic as they are, as they play themselves out, will give a good indication of the events that the USA and other countries will realize in the years to come as The Long Emergency’ comes to pass.[Ha! Just as I finish this, guess what… the power is out, the battery life in my laptop is about 5 mins, so at 11am, I cannot be productive for the rest of the day… the networks are down, so this cannot be mailed for the moment.]
Home
==
17 February update: More on South Africa's electricity shortage: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/01/journal-south-a.html
I got a letter from a lady in South Africa:
"I am watching South Africa with an eye on what, when and how the global trends contributing to your Long Emergency will start taking effect. But the government here, together with some outside influences of the stock market, have plunged South Africa into the Premature Long Emergency. It has only been a couple of weeks, but the country is in dire straits. . . ."
...
http://www.kunstler.com/Grunt_SouthAfrica.html
SOUTH AFRICA IN THE PREMATURE LONG EMERGENCY
February 4, 2008
It began with a few potholes in the roads, the odd interruption to the water supply in the suburbs, a couple of days with strike action preventing the delivery of municipal services – no garbage collection, protest action disrupting the mining industry and picketing & toy toying at shopping malls…It continued over the next couple of years, largely with disregard for the disruptions, a little irritation to daily commercial and home life by the lack of service provision in food, gas, water and power. In recent months, at the receivables end of the supply chain, there was a little aggravation at the delays, the lack of service, the shortage of a few consumer luxuries in the retail shops…, ‘but hey, what the hell, this is a great country, we cannot fault the lifestyle, the weather…’. For a couple of months, perhaps a year back or so, there seemed little or no reason to change our way of life, our lifestyles…a little further down the road and the disruptions become more frequent, we learn to cope, learn to accept the rising cost of living, gas supply shortages in the Winter of 2007, the intermittent water disruptions, the odd power outage and the potholes. Potholes may well be the singular measure of the calamity we are in or about to face. We accept the transitions in South Africa, but it is all very well passing over these problems in the name of development, infrastructure development, greater housing plans and urbanization as a promised deliverable by the ANC government, together with the balancing of the wealth quotient. Access to finance and the shift of the material wealth are an indication of the success of the plans for economic growth in the New South Africa. So, there have been interesting times, a few PDI’s (previously disadvantaged individuals), through black economic empowerment, becoming significantly enriched through commerce and business and, dare I say, politics. But the cracks that are now evident are tell tails signs, not only of the effectivity of the New South Africa and an explanation of the path traveled to this point in time, but more of what is promised for the future. And the future may be more a by product of global issues than issues unique and unfortunate to South Africa.
So what do we have at hand, what are the reactions and what are the consequences??? South Africa has been flung full tilt into a Premature Long Emergency. In the up market suburbs, not least to say generally all over the urban landscape, there is not a 1km (1/2 mile) strip of tarred road that is not full of potholes (hugh gapping holes, across which vehicles cannot drive), the roadside curbs are disintegrating, the road maintenance programmes over the last 10 years have failed to maintain the roads in a serviceable and passable state. The nation is gripped in a crisis of rolling power outages caused by the incompetence of highly paid government ministers and their charges. The news of the weekend is that the nation is in dire straits with the supply of clean, drinkable water to households and business alike. We are faced with unusual weather patterns, floods at the moment, high rain fall for the Summer, the expectation of an early, long cold Winter.
THE POWER EMERGENCY
The rolling power outages are resulting in about a 25% national power outage per month. The ramifications of this can be related directly to an income loss of the same amount, retail supplies are being interrupted and from a security point of view it is dangerous to shop in malls. The Electricity Supply Commission – ESKOM are indicating a forced reduction on power usage by 10%, further, the mines have been told not to work on Fridays. There are revenue and cost implications here that extend beyond the obvious monthly figures. What of the power saving measures that may in turn lead to greater problems, the mines are unable to pump excess ground water from the shafts, the maintenance programmes are due to suffer. And what of the safety indications, miners are protesting the possibility of being caught under ground or in lift shafts as the random power cuts hit the service grids. It is not only that ESKOM have not maintained or expanded their operations in the last 15 years, but the next big whammy is that there is no coal to keep the power stations running…at most times, there is a couple of months supply of coal onsite for electricity operations, today there is hardly a few days supply. Incidentally the reason given for this catastrophe is that the trucks delivering the coal have been unable to get to the power stations as the road infrastructure has deteriorated- potholes again. In the Afrikaans language: ‘slaggate’ – a direct translation to ‘slaughter holes’. As this is written, we wait for the next couple of days to see the effect of the ‘coal emergency’.
THE WATER EMERGENCY
At some point the effect of the power emergency on water and sanitation supply should be considered and this would be part of the roll out of unexpected events resultant of the collapse of the power supply, but the water board have usurped the power supply with homegrown problems of their own…
So here we have it, 43% of the dams have safety problems and are in danger of collapsing. Further to this, the ground water in Gauteng, the province of Johannesburg, has radioactive contamination from mining operations. Now, as a matter of interest, Johannesburg is one of the few cities in the world that is built on a hill and water has to be pumped up into the city!!!
THE FROG IN THE POT
And what of the peoples reaction? Complacency does not even come close, the nation is either brain dead or ignorant, or just plain ‘frog in a pot’ of water with the temperature rising. The first reaction to the power emergency took the form of a rush for candles, refilling of gas bottles and the purchasing of generators (if you could get them). Then the complacency set it, business learnt to sit through power outages, retail shops were forced to close their doors for a few hours a day. There was and is a shortage of food supplies, food went bad in the fridges and had to been thrown away. It was kind of charming in a strange kind of way, to eat dinner by candle light and forgo the ‘soapies’ on TV. Traffic lights were out over a large number of suburbs and delays in getting to business meetings became the norm. The schools are unable to teach a full day’s lesson. The internet service providers and the mobile phone companies’ frequently have service delays or are just plain ‘off line’. The battery runs out on your laptop and that’s the days productive work is over until the power is back on…Patients in ICU or undergoing operations, as the power grid went down, were at risk of and did, die.
As we head into February, it will be interesting to see the economic figures; theoretically the revenue generation for the period should be down by at least 25% or something similar to the power outage percentages. Notwithstanding that the stock market took a bend downwards and followed the USA crash and the antics of the Societé General rogue trader. (Well done on the foresight, James). The South African property market is following suit, as well. And just as we were wondering how the effect, implications and opinions of an emergency would pan out into daily life, what the tell tail signs would be… it happened, all of this is the short space of about 2-3 weeks, the realization dawns that it has begun, the country is experiencing and living through the beginning of the Long Emergency, rather unexpectedly and certainly too prematurely. I proffer that the events in South Africa, tragic as they are, as they play themselves out, will give a good indication of the events that the USA and other countries will realize in the years to come as The Long Emergency’ comes to pass.[Ha! Just as I finish this, guess what… the power is out, the battery life in my laptop is about 5 mins, so at 11am, I cannot be productive for the rest of the day… the networks are down, so this cannot be mailed for the moment.]
Home
==
17 February update: More on South Africa's electricity shortage: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/01/journal-south-a.html
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Ron Paul Scales Back Campaign
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124885.html
Ron's message in full:
February 08, 2008
Message from Ron
Whoa! What a year this has been. And what achievements we have had. If I may quote Trotsky of all people, this Revolution is permanent. It will not end at the Republican convention. It will not end in November. It will not end until we have won the great battle on which we have embarked. Not because of me, but because of you. Millions of Americans -- and friends in many other countries -- have dedicated themselves to the principles of liberty: to free enterprise, limited government, sound money, no income tax, and peace. We will not falter so long as there is one restriction on our persons, our property, our civil liberties. How much I owe you. I can never possibly repay your generous donations, hard work, whole-hearted dedication and love of freedom. How blessed I am to be associated with you. Carol, of course, sends her love as well.
Let me tell you my thoughts. With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.
I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.
In the presidential race and the congressional race, I need your support, as always. And I have plans to continue fighting for our ideas in politics and education that I will share with you when I can, for I will need you at my side. In the meantime, onward and upward! The neocons, the warmongers, the socialists, the advocates of inflation will be hearing much from you and me.
Sincerely,
Ron
Ron's message in full:
February 08, 2008
Message from Ron
Whoa! What a year this has been. And what achievements we have had. If I may quote Trotsky of all people, this Revolution is permanent. It will not end at the Republican convention. It will not end in November. It will not end until we have won the great battle on which we have embarked. Not because of me, but because of you. Millions of Americans -- and friends in many other countries -- have dedicated themselves to the principles of liberty: to free enterprise, limited government, sound money, no income tax, and peace. We will not falter so long as there is one restriction on our persons, our property, our civil liberties. How much I owe you. I can never possibly repay your generous donations, hard work, whole-hearted dedication and love of freedom. How blessed I am to be associated with you. Carol, of course, sends her love as well.
Let me tell you my thoughts. With Romney gone, the chances of a brokered convention are nearly zero. But that does not affect my determination to fight on, in every caucus and primary remaining, and at the convention for our ideas, with just as many delegates as I can get. But with so many primaries and caucuses now over, we do not now need so big a national campaign staff, and so I am making it leaner and tighter. Of course, I am committed to fighting for our ideas within the Republican party, so there will be no third party run. I do not denigrate third parties -- just the opposite, and I have long worked to remove the ballot-access restrictions on them. But I am a Republican, and I will remain a Republican.
I also have another priority. I have constituents in my home district that I must serve. I cannot and will not let them down. And I have another battle I must face here as well. If I were to lose the primary for my congressional seat, all our opponents would react with glee, and pretend it was a rejection of our ideas. I cannot and will not let that happen.
In the presidential race and the congressional race, I need your support, as always. And I have plans to continue fighting for our ideas in politics and education that I will share with you when I can, for I will need you at my side. In the meantime, onward and upward! The neocons, the warmongers, the socialists, the advocates of inflation will be hearing much from you and me.
Sincerely,
Ron
Lookalikes: Barack Obama and Aubrey Graham
For a long time I've noticed how much Barack Obama looks like Aubrey Graham ("Jimmy Brooks" in Degrassi: The Next Generation). And now I've finally gotten around to posting photos of the two so you can decide for yourself how similar they look.13 February update: The New York Times erred in comparing Barack with Lenny Kravitz, thus inviting this sarcastic post from--Carrot Top?
Thursday, February 07, 2008
R.I.P. James Capozzola
While looking through this blog's list of political links, I clicked on The Rittenhouse Review. The last post was in July 2007. Googling James Capozzola's name in hopes of finding what he's been up to lately, I found out that he had died. I offer my very belated condolences to any friends or family of his who may read this. And I recommend that you check out The Rittenhouse Review, whose link I will leave in the Politics section of the list of links.
Monday, February 04, 2008
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