(Revised 11 August 2008)Kunstler's review of The Dark Knight is overall astute, but I disagree with some of his points, especially this: "The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it!" While Commissioner Gordon does smash the Bat-Signal (which he had created in Batman Begins), he does so "at Batman's request, allowing himself to be blamed for the murders carried out by Harvey Dent/Two-Face in order to preserve Dent's reputation in Gotham City." Heroism is evidenced when a prisoner on one of two ferries evacuating Gothamites throws away the detonator to the explosives on the other ferry, while his counterpart on the other boat also refrains from pushing the button. Of course, Batman is preventing the Joker from blowing up both vessels, unbeknownst to the evacuees, but the scene demonstrates people can act morally even under such duress.
Kusntler points out that "Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams 'no shelter here!'" But that's not new. In the dystopia We, citizens live "in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass...". Remember that Wayne Manor (portrayed in Batman Begins by Mentmore Towers) was largely destroyed by a fire set by Ra's al Ghul at that movie's end and is still being rebuilt in The Dark Knight. The apartment Kunstler decries is a penthouse in one of Bruce Wayne's hotels. Yet the penthouse has a secret entrance to a location within the building serving as a temporary Batcave. More on the sets here.
I wonder if others have or will pick up on the themes of concealment and revealment, interiority and exteriority in the movie.
11 August 2008 update: James Wolcott links to Kunstler's review on JamesHowardKunstler.typepad.com, which, unlike Kunstler.com, includes readers' comments. In only 24 days in release, The Dark Knight has become the third-highest grossing movie in American history. The movie's significance will become apparent only in retrospect. For now, people are wondering if it will match or surpass the aptly-named Titanic in box office.
August 4, 2008
Dark (K)night
Note: Posting early this week on account of weekend road trip.
The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.
The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug's game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.
Gotham City, the setting for all these sadomasochistic vignettes, is a place devoid of comfort. (The suburbs are missing completely.) Even the personal haunts of "the Batman," a.k.a. zillionaire Bruce Wayne, are hard-edged non-spaces. His workplace (cleverly accessed via a dumpster) is an underground bunker the size of about three football fields with a claustrophobic drop ceiling and a single furnishing: the megalomaniacal computer console that is supposed to afford him "control" of the city, but which appears to be, in fact, a completely impotent sham piece of techno-junk, since it can't even outperform a $300 GPS unit in locating things. By the way, Hitler had a brighter sense of decor in the final days of the bunker. Bruce Wayne's personal apartment is one of those horrid glass-walled tower condos beloved of the starchitects, which, in its florid exposure to everything external practically screams "no shelter here!"
At the center of all this is the character called "The Joker." Judging by the reams of reviews and reportage about this movie elsewhere in the media, the death of actor Heath Ledger, who played the role, adds another layer of juicy sadomasochistic deliciousness to the proceedings -- we get to reflect that the monster on screen may have gotten away, but the anxiety-ridden young actor who played him was carted off to the bone orchard before the film even officially wrapped, (and therefore deserves extra special consideration for America's greatest honor, the Oscar award, while the audience deserves its own award for recognizing the lovely ironies embroidered in this cultural phenomenon.)
The Joker is not so much as person as a force of nature, a "black swan" in clown white. He has no fingerprints, no ID, no labels in his clothing. All he has is the memory of an evil father who performed a symbolic sadomasochistic oral rape on him, and so he is now programmed to go about similarly mutilating folks, blowing things up, and wrecking everyone's hopes and dreams because he has nothing better to do. He represents himself simply as an agent of "chaos." Taken at face value, he would seem to symbolize the deadly forces of entropy that now threatens to unravel real American life in the real world -- a combination of our foolish over- investments in complexity and the frightening capriciousness of both nature and history, which do not reveal their motivations to us.
By the way, forget about God here or anything that even remotely smacks of an oppositional notion to evil. All that's back on the cutting room floor somewhere (if it even got that far). And I say this as a non-religious person. But the absence of any possible idea of redemption for the human spirit is impressive. In the world of "the Batman," humanity at its very best is capable only of being confused about itself. This is perhaps an interesting new form of dramaturgy -- instead of good-versus-evil you only get befuddlement-versus-evil. Goodness has lost its way in the dark night of the American psyche, as might be understandable considering the nation of louts, liars, grifters, bullies, meth freaks, harpies, and tattooed creeps we have become. The best we can bring to this predicament is the low-grade pop therapy that passes for thinking nowadays in educated circles. Any consideration of the heroic is off the menu here. We can't ask that much of ourselves. It's too difficult to imagine. Meanwhile, The People -- that is, the citizens of Gotham City -- literally banish even the possibility of heroism from town at the end of the movie -- they take an axe to it! -- perhaps indicating that they deserve whatever befalls them or, shall I say, "us."
A few other striking elements of this spectacle deserve attention. One is the grandiosity that saturates the story elements, and the remarkable impotence of it all. The Batman possesses every high-tech weapon and survival implement ever dreamed up, yet they avail him nothing -- except a lot off sickening leaps off skyscrapers and futile hard landings on car roofs, shipping containers, sidewalks, and other human carcasses. I doubt the writers/director Chris and Jonathan Nolan consciously aimed to depict good old American ingenuity as utterly valueless in the face of chaos, but that's the effect. Otherwise, everything in the Batman's world is overscaled and out-of-whack from the size of Bruce Wayne's fortune (what an executive package his Daddy must have made off with, and from which investment bank?!), to the energy expended in so many car chases and explosions, to the super-sized doom-worthy towers of the gigantic, soulless city.
Finally there is the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book. How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're to far gone -- and even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Sunday, August 03, 2008
This Ain't No Hula!
It's a Hard Ticket to Hawaii.
And to think I've never heard of this movie until 5:50 P.M. today while I was browsing on YouTube.
And to think I've never heard of this movie until 5:50 P.M. today while I was browsing on YouTube.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Good Knight!
Ever the contrarian, Armond White finds Heath Ledger's Joker far inferior to Jack Nicholson's.
Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children—which was the original, sophisticated point of Jack Nicholson’s ’89 Joker. Nicholson’s disfigurement abstracted psychosis, being sufficiently hideous without confusing our sympathy. Ledger’s Joker (sweaty clown’s make-up to cover his Black Dahlia–style facial scar) descends from the serial killer clichés of Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh—fashionable icons of modern irrational fear. The Joker’s escalation of urban chaos and destruction is accompanied by booming sound effects and sirens—to spook excitable kids. Ledger’s already-overrated performance consists of a Ratso Rizzo voice and lots of lip-licking. But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place?
Unlike Nicholson’s multileveled characterization, Ledger reduces The Joker to one-note ham-acting and trite symbolism. If you fell for the evil-versus-evil antagonism of There Will Be Blood, then The Dark Knight should be the movie of your wretched dreams. Nolan’s unvaried direction drives home the depressing similarities between Batman and his nemeses. Nolan’s single trick is to torment viewers with relentless action montages; distracting ellipses that create narrative frustration and paranoia. Delayed resolution. Fake tension. Such effects used to be called cheap. Cheap like The Joker’s psychobabble: “Madness, as you know, is like gravity—all it takes is a little push.” The Dark Knight is the sentinel of our cultural abyss. All it takes is a push.
Man’s struggle to be good isn’t news. The difficulty only scares children—which was the original, sophisticated point of Jack Nicholson’s ’89 Joker. Nicholson’s disfigurement abstracted psychosis, being sufficiently hideous without confusing our sympathy. Ledger’s Joker (sweaty clown’s make-up to cover his Black Dahlia–style facial scar) descends from the serial killer clichés of Hannibal Lecter and Anton Chigurh—fashionable icons of modern irrational fear. The Joker’s escalation of urban chaos and destruction is accompanied by booming sound effects and sirens—to spook excitable kids. Ledger’s already-overrated performance consists of a Ratso Rizzo voice and lots of lip-licking. But how great of an actor was Ledger to accept this trite material in the first place?
Unlike Nicholson’s multileveled characterization, Ledger reduces The Joker to one-note ham-acting and trite symbolism. If you fell for the evil-versus-evil antagonism of There Will Be Blood, then The Dark Knight should be the movie of your wretched dreams. Nolan’s unvaried direction drives home the depressing similarities between Batman and his nemeses. Nolan’s single trick is to torment viewers with relentless action montages; distracting ellipses that create narrative frustration and paranoia. Delayed resolution. Fake tension. Such effects used to be called cheap. Cheap like The Joker’s psychobabble: “Madness, as you know, is like gravity—all it takes is a little push.” The Dark Knight is the sentinel of our cultural abyss. All it takes is a push.
Monday, July 28, 2008
The Banality
July 28, 2008
The Coming Re-Becoming
Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don't mean that we are a better people than any other society--these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts -- but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle "time out" from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we're sailing into now.
We were fortunate to inhabit a New World filled with productive land, lots of minerals, and plenty of coal, oil, and gas; and the land itself was insulated physically from the great theaters of 20th century conflict, though we fought in wars "over there." That experience itself, especially our victory over manifest evil in the Second World War, left us with a dangerous mentality of triumphal exceptionalism. Even now, we think we are immune to the epochal hazards of history. The notion that nothing really bad can happen to us is reflected in the blind cluelessness of our current news media and their simple failure to report what is now happening.
I drove up along an obscure stretch of the upper Hudson river on Sunday, starting in the old factory town of Cohoes, north of Albany, where the Mohawk River runs into the Hudson. There is a powerful waterfall there, and along the high bank the massive old red-brick Harmony Mill still stands with its Victorian towers and mansard roofs, like a vision from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Behind them are streets of red-brick, three-story worker row-housing from the same period. Today they are inhabited by a different kind of poor people, not necessarily working, and probably suffering from a sheer lack of structure in their lives as well as plain poverty of means. These are people who probably don't follow the Bloomberg financial bulletins, and their experience of a cratering economy may only be the rising cost of cigarettes and beer.
The tattoo quotient among both men and women there is impressive. In the days when the Harmony Mill was built, only South Seas cannibals and sailors wore tattoos. You wonder: are tattoos now the only way left for this class of Americans to assert their selfhood? And what exactly are they proclaiming? I am a warrior. Or is it: I am a television (I display pictures, too) !? The expanding class of the poor-and-idle has been remarkably passive in the face of their dwindling prospects. Perhaps they passed the point years ago (a generation or two ago!) when there was any sense of sequential improvement for the family's station-in-life. The destiny of their everyday lives must seem totally beyond their control. They are subject to the fate of distant corporations who sell the staple corn-syrup byproducts and gasoline on which daily life is based. Where government is concerned, they are all potential victims of Katrina-ism, awaiting their own personal disaster.
North of the junction of the Mohawk and Hudson was the old town of Waterford, where the Erie Canal began its journey west -- bypassing those powerful waterfalls. The locks are still there and still in operation for the infrequent tanker ships and ore barges that come and go to the Great Lakes. But the operation of the canal system is automated to the extent that it requires only a handful of people to run the locks now, and the town around them has deteriorated into slum and semi-slum garnished with a few convenience stores and pizza shops. There is no other commerce there. No matter how poor, the denizens are required to drive a car to a giant chain store for groceries or hardware or clothing.
As you leave Waterford, the river road becomes a suburban corridor of 1960s-vintage ranch houses and stand-alone small retail business buildings which, if used at all now, are mostly hair salons, chiropractic studios, and other services not generally rendered by the chain stores. All this stuff was deployed along the road with the expectation that Americans would be driving cars cheaply forever. Now that this is distinctly no longer the case, corridors like this are entering their death throes. The awfulness of the design and construction of these buildings is now especially vivid as the plywood de-laminates, and the vinyl soffits fall off, and the dinge of neglect forms a patina over it all. Hopelessness infects this landscape like a miasma. Whatever young adults remain in these places are not thinking about a plausible future, only looking to complete their full array of tattoos and lose themselves in raptures of sex, methedrine, and video aggression.
Eventually, after running through the disintegrating towns of Mechanicville (once a place of earnest labor, just like it sounds, now a morass of sinking car dealerships and Quik-stops), and Stillwater (smaller version of the same), the road turned completely rural and few other cars ventured up there. The decisive Revolutionary battle of Saratoga was fought near there on the bluffs and hills overlooking the Hudson in 1777. You wonder what the heroes of that battle would think of what we have become. What would they make of the word "consumer" that we use to describe our relation to the world? What would they think of excellent river bottom-land that is now barely used for farming -- or, where it is still farmed (dairying if anything), of farmers who will not even put in a kitchen garden for themselves because it might detract from their hours of TV viewing?
The sclerosis of American life is shocking. If you go further north up the Hudson River, to Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, you'll see a nation that seems ready to crawl off and die. There, it appears too far gone to even put up a proxy fight on a video screen. Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all. I have no doubt we're heading into a convulsion that will wring much of this junk and dross into the backwaters of history. We're capable of being something better than this, of putting our time on earth to better use, including a more respectful treatment of the land we inhabit. This year and the next will be the years of letting go, and out of that we'll commence a re-becoming.
The Coming Re-Becoming
Everywhere you turn in this nation, you see a society primed for implosion. We seem unaware how extraordinary the American experience has been, especially in the last hundred years. By this, I don't mean that we are a better people than any other society--these days, ordinary people in the USA make an effort to appear thuggish and act surly, as though we were a nation of convicts -- but for decade-upon-decade, we were very fortunate. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s may seem like a relatively peaceful and gentle "time out" from a frantic era of hypertrophic growth, compared to the storm we're sailing into now.
We were fortunate to inhabit a New World filled with productive land, lots of minerals, and plenty of coal, oil, and gas; and the land itself was insulated physically from the great theaters of 20th century conflict, though we fought in wars "over there." That experience itself, especially our victory over manifest evil in the Second World War, left us with a dangerous mentality of triumphal exceptionalism. Even now, we think we are immune to the epochal hazards of history. The notion that nothing really bad can happen to us is reflected in the blind cluelessness of our current news media and their simple failure to report what is now happening.
I drove up along an obscure stretch of the upper Hudson river on Sunday, starting in the old factory town of Cohoes, north of Albany, where the Mohawk River runs into the Hudson. There is a powerful waterfall there, and along the high bank the massive old red-brick Harmony Mill still stands with its Victorian towers and mansard roofs, like a vision from an Alfred Hitchcock movie. Behind them are streets of red-brick, three-story worker row-housing from the same period. Today they are inhabited by a different kind of poor people, not necessarily working, and probably suffering from a sheer lack of structure in their lives as well as plain poverty of means. These are people who probably don't follow the Bloomberg financial bulletins, and their experience of a cratering economy may only be the rising cost of cigarettes and beer.
The tattoo quotient among both men and women there is impressive. In the days when the Harmony Mill was built, only South Seas cannibals and sailors wore tattoos. You wonder: are tattoos now the only way left for this class of Americans to assert their selfhood? And what exactly are they proclaiming? I am a warrior. Or is it: I am a television (I display pictures, too) !? The expanding class of the poor-and-idle has been remarkably passive in the face of their dwindling prospects. Perhaps they passed the point years ago (a generation or two ago!) when there was any sense of sequential improvement for the family's station-in-life. The destiny of their everyday lives must seem totally beyond their control. They are subject to the fate of distant corporations who sell the staple corn-syrup byproducts and gasoline on which daily life is based. Where government is concerned, they are all potential victims of Katrina-ism, awaiting their own personal disaster.
North of the junction of the Mohawk and Hudson was the old town of Waterford, where the Erie Canal began its journey west -- bypassing those powerful waterfalls. The locks are still there and still in operation for the infrequent tanker ships and ore barges that come and go to the Great Lakes. But the operation of the canal system is automated to the extent that it requires only a handful of people to run the locks now, and the town around them has deteriorated into slum and semi-slum garnished with a few convenience stores and pizza shops. There is no other commerce there. No matter how poor, the denizens are required to drive a car to a giant chain store for groceries or hardware or clothing.
As you leave Waterford, the river road becomes a suburban corridor of 1960s-vintage ranch houses and stand-alone small retail business buildings which, if used at all now, are mostly hair salons, chiropractic studios, and other services not generally rendered by the chain stores. All this stuff was deployed along the road with the expectation that Americans would be driving cars cheaply forever. Now that this is distinctly no longer the case, corridors like this are entering their death throes. The awfulness of the design and construction of these buildings is now especially vivid as the plywood de-laminates, and the vinyl soffits fall off, and the dinge of neglect forms a patina over it all. Hopelessness infects this landscape like a miasma. Whatever young adults remain in these places are not thinking about a plausible future, only looking to complete their full array of tattoos and lose themselves in raptures of sex, methedrine, and video aggression.
Eventually, after running through the disintegrating towns of Mechanicville (once a place of earnest labor, just like it sounds, now a morass of sinking car dealerships and Quik-stops), and Stillwater (smaller version of the same), the road turned completely rural and few other cars ventured up there. The decisive Revolutionary battle of Saratoga was fought near there on the bluffs and hills overlooking the Hudson in 1777. You wonder what the heroes of that battle would think of what we have become. What would they make of the word "consumer" that we use to describe our relation to the world? What would they think of excellent river bottom-land that is now barely used for farming -- or, where it is still farmed (dairying if anything), of farmers who will not even put in a kitchen garden for themselves because it might detract from their hours of TV viewing?
The sclerosis of American life is shocking. If you go further north up the Hudson River, to Fort Edward and Hudson Falls, you'll see a nation that seems ready to crawl off and die. There, it appears too far gone to even put up a proxy fight on a video screen. Frankly, I don't want that version of America to survive -- the America of chain stores, and muscle cars, and grown men obsessed with video games, drugs, and pornography, and women decorated like cannibals, and the vast, crushing purposelessness of it all. I have no doubt we're heading into a convulsion that will wring much of this junk and dross into the backwaters of history. We're capable of being something better than this, of putting our time on earth to better use, including a more respectful treatment of the land we inhabit. This year and the next will be the years of letting go, and out of that we'll commence a re-becoming.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Dreher and Kunstler
Dreher recently spoke with Kunstler about peak oil for The Dallas Morning News:
I had an e-mail exchange this morning with Jim Kunstler, as part of an interview for a project the editorial page is doing on the peak oil controversy. Jim told me that his college audiences across the South are very hostile to his Long Emergency ideas -- a hostility Jim chalks up to their not being happy being told that their car-based way of life is going to change radically. I suspect Jim's right, but then again, I agree with Jim's basic take on the energy situation. We all know that Jim's got a colorful, hyperbolic way of expressing himself, so it's possible that some of the harsh reaction comes from his Old Testament prophetic style.
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Big Red
I was watching 20/20: Sex in America last night. John Stossel periodically interviewed someone from the Family Research Council aptly named Peter Sprigg. Does he resemble the actor Matt Ross (according to IMDb.com, he "is most frequently cast as spineless corporate-types")? You make the call.
Friday, July 18, 2008
Buildings Under Construction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Buildings_under_construction
http://rubbahslippahsinitaly.blogspot.com/
http://rubbahslippahsinitaly.blogspot.com/
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Anson Chong
Keliipio extends congratulations (as do I) to Hunter Bishop on the second anniversary of his blog. From her comment I learned this:
Mahalo Hunter for keeping Puna connected through your blog. Even my friend and former State Senator Anson Chong contributed a few posts before his illness and his passing yesterday. July 16, 2008 | KELIIPIO
Anson Chong's blog.
R.I.P., Anson Chong.
Mahalo Hunter for keeping Puna connected through your blog. Even my friend and former State Senator Anson Chong contributed a few posts before his illness and his passing yesterday. July 16, 2008 | KELIIPIO
Anson Chong's blog.
R.I.P., Anson Chong.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Saturday, July 12, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
What Now? Part Five
29 July Update: I just found out about Coconut Girl and her take on what she calls "the sad state of Big Island newspapers."
====
Hunter Bishop reports on his blog that the Hawaii Island Journal might come back, probably in August or September.
By chance on Monday or Tuesday night I saw part of the televised testimony before the County Council. Peter Serafin spoke, followed by a woman from the ad department (I think). She said that the three main departments of the paper often operated as three independent entities, and thus were out of sync. Senior writer Alan McNarie opened with a remark that Serafin's and the woman's testimony were both true but that the paper's demise was more "complex" than that. The bulk of his testimony blamed Honolulu Weekly's 2005 acquisition for making the paper "not local." He also said bloggers are "inherently biased," as if papers aren't.
I'm curious about the Island Sun, whose inaugural run of 5,000 copies might mean it'll be hard to find an issue. No website that I can see either. And will people read the Big Island Weekly, Hawaii Free Press (the black sheep of the Big Island alternative media), Island Sun, and a resurgent Hawaii Island Journal? I'd like to think so. The only thing is that BIW, IS, and HIJ might be clones of one another. Each may be a liberal-left paper with lots of arts, some politics, etc., but each should develop its own personality. Book, movie, music, and art reviews, obviously. Sports coverage (see the Village Voice's Jockbeat for inspiration). Cartoons. Big Island Weekly's publication of Berido's cartoons are a good step in the right direction.
====
Hunter Bishop reports on his blog that the Hawaii Island Journal might come back, probably in August or September.
By chance on Monday or Tuesday night I saw part of the televised testimony before the County Council. Peter Serafin spoke, followed by a woman from the ad department (I think). She said that the three main departments of the paper often operated as three independent entities, and thus were out of sync. Senior writer Alan McNarie opened with a remark that Serafin's and the woman's testimony were both true but that the paper's demise was more "complex" than that. The bulk of his testimony blamed Honolulu Weekly's 2005 acquisition for making the paper "not local." He also said bloggers are "inherently biased," as if papers aren't.
I'm curious about the Island Sun, whose inaugural run of 5,000 copies might mean it'll be hard to find an issue. No website that I can see either. And will people read the Big Island Weekly, Hawaii Free Press (the black sheep of the Big Island alternative media), Island Sun, and a resurgent Hawaii Island Journal? I'd like to think so. The only thing is that BIW, IS, and HIJ might be clones of one another. Each may be a liberal-left paper with lots of arts, some politics, etc., but each should develop its own personality. Book, movie, music, and art reviews, obviously. Sports coverage (see the Village Voice's Jockbeat for inspiration). Cartoons. Big Island Weekly's publication of Berido's cartoons are a good step in the right direction.
Monday, July 07, 2008
Cleaning Out Magazine Cabinet
Yesterday I took the plunge and spent five hours sorting out hundreds of magazines, accumulated over many years, in the garage. I'm still not finished but I made a large dent, such that most of the magazines fit nicely on two and one-half shelves, rather than three shelves and two bins stuffed full.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
The Content, Not the Frequency.
http://mrmagazine.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/it-is-the-content-and-not-the-frequency/
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
What Now? Part Four
From HunterBishop.com
Serafin's testimony on HIJ's demise
What follows is former Hawaii Island Journal Editor Peter Serafin's testimony to the Hawaii County Planning Commttee on Tuesday:
1 July 08
Peter's Council Testimony:
Members of the council, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. My name is Peter Serafin; for the past 2 1/2 years it's been my great pleasure and privilege to have served as editor of Hawai'i Island Journal. I'd like to start off by thanking Chairman Naole for providing me this opportunity to discuss the recent closure of the Journal, a locally owned newspaper which many on this island and elsewhere consider a valuable local resource.
In certain lines of work, the rewards are not exclusively, nor even primarily, financial. Firefighters. School teachers. Police officers. Health care workers. They certainly earn enough to support their families, but nobody gets rich doing these jobs. However, for a certain kind of person the additional reward provided is much more valuable than money: the opportunity for some type of community or public service.
So it is with journalists. Our function is to provide the most complete information we can, so citizens can make the best decisions they can. This is essential to a functional democracy. In fact, the Founding Fathers of the United States considered an independent press so important that it is the only profession protected, by name, in the Constitution.
For the past nine years, HIJ has served the community as a small, locally-owned newspaper. Then, as now, most local news coverage was provided by Stephens Media Group, a conglomerate of approximately 65 newspapers nationwide that is ultimately controlled from the company's headquarters in Las Vegas. On this island they owned both daily papers and a few smaller ones.
When the Journal started, the two Stephens dailies – West Hawaii Today and Hawaii Tribune-Herald — seldom ventured far from either Kailua-Kona or Hilo, respectively. The activities and concerns of people in Ka'u, Hamakua, Puna and other areas were ignored or, at best, underreported. To an extent, that has changed. We believe that the fact that the dailies are doing a bit better in covering these previously forgotten districts is a direct result of the Journal's example.
We morphed from Ka'u Landing into the Journal in 1998, and by 2005 were publishing biweekly, ultimately distributing 24,000 copies of each issue island wide. Over the years we'd built a reputation of looking deeper into local issues than the dailies did. We took the time to investigate without the pressure of daily deadlines, nor the requirement that a reporter write one story per day.
The Journal grew steadily, and eventually began getting attention beyond this island. Last summer in Honolulu we received top honors from the Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for Best Community Reporting and Best Feature Writing. We won two of the four statewide categories we were eligible for. During the year no other Hawai'i Island paper was considered the best in any category. We were batting .500 -- not bad in any league. Then just last month, on our third attempt, we were accepted into the highly selective national organization the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Despite these journalistic successes, we faced challenges on the business side. To print a paper like ours requires a Web press, which can cost over $1 million. Through the country, daily newspapers are the ones that an afford this expensive equipment. But their presses are busy only a few hours a day printing the paper. To maximize revenue from this expensive asset, virtually every newspaper company in the country takes on additional contract printing jobs in their off hours. For example, the New York Times press always printed the New York City phone book, and dozens of other outside jobs. It's standard in the industry.
Stephens Media owns the only two Web presses on this island, where they print the Trib-Herald and West Hawaii Today. Lane Wick, HIJ's previous owner, approached Stephens with a contract job to print the Journal. Their response: We'll only print the Journal if you sell us a controlling interest. As a believer in independent journalism, Wick turned them down. With the new publisher, it was the same story – we won't print you unless we own you. The Journal continued to be printed in Honolulu at the Star-Bulletin press.
Although they couldn't buy us, Stephens still wanted a monopoly. A year and a half ago they launched Big Island Weekly, a copycat paper specifically created to drive the Journal out of business. They pursued a strategy similar to the one go! airlines used against Aloha Air. Sell the product – be it advertising space or airline tickets – below cost, and make up the shortfall with cash infusions from the parent company on the mainland. Since the local company has to actually earn the money it costs to operate, keep it up and you'll eventually drive them out of business.
I'd like to make it perfectly clear that the local staffers of Big Island Weekly have nothing to do with this strategy of their bosses. Like the local go! Airlines workers, they're happy to have a job here doing something they enjoy. But make no mistake: just because the local BIW employees didn't know what their bosses on the mainland were up to doesn't mean it wasn't happening. It most certainly was. And a news monopoly serves no one – except, of course, the one holding the monopoly.
This isn't the only place independent newspapers are being attacked like this. In San Francisco, the Bay Guardian newspaper has been publishing every week for almost 40 years. A few years ago a media conglomerate came in from out of town. They launched the competing San Francisco Weekly and sold extremely cheap advertising. The Bay Guardian sued, charging the Weekly was using predatory pricing and cash infusions from the parent corporation intended to unfairly damage their paper. A court agreed and awarded the Bay Guardian $15 million in damages. The ruling stood on appeal.
Besides being targeted by Stephens, the Journal also faced industry-wide challenges. Like all other newspapers – free or paid – the bulk of our revenue came from advertising. Industry wide, newspaper classified ad revenues dropped 5% last year – a continuing trend over the past decade. Print ads were similarly affected nationally.
So what now? Do the people of this island want and deserve multiple news sources? We think they do. Are they content to get all their local news from one off-island company that owns both our dailies, the only commercial TV station and most of the other papers? We think not. I believe people here are smarter than that and want more than that.
Despite their best efforts, corporate media hasn't managed to control everything yet. Blogging is still in its infancy, but locally Hunter Bishop, Aaron Stene and others are giving us online alternatives to the monopoly, as does the new Island Sun.
As for the Journal, it may not be completely dead after all. I was off-island at the beginning of a long-planned vacation when the publisher called and said she was suspending publication. Since then I've been overwhelmed with calls and emails of support – strongly urging us to carry on. A number of investors are in discussion to buy the paper and relaunch publication. Anyone interested in participating in this effort, or anyone with any questions is welcome to contact me at SaveTheJournal@mac.com. As I've always said, I love hearing from readers.
Mahalo for your attention and for this opportunity to speak here.
Peter Serafin
Editor
Hawai'i Island Journal
SaveTheJournal@mac.com
Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 07:38AM by Hunter Bishop | Post a Comment
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Serafin's testimony on HIJ's demise
What follows is former Hawaii Island Journal Editor Peter Serafin's testimony to the Hawaii County Planning Commttee on Tuesday:
1 July 08
Peter's Council Testimony:
Members of the council, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. My name is Peter Serafin; for the past 2 1/2 years it's been my great pleasure and privilege to have served as editor of Hawai'i Island Journal. I'd like to start off by thanking Chairman Naole for providing me this opportunity to discuss the recent closure of the Journal, a locally owned newspaper which many on this island and elsewhere consider a valuable local resource.
In certain lines of work, the rewards are not exclusively, nor even primarily, financial. Firefighters. School teachers. Police officers. Health care workers. They certainly earn enough to support their families, but nobody gets rich doing these jobs. However, for a certain kind of person the additional reward provided is much more valuable than money: the opportunity for some type of community or public service.
So it is with journalists. Our function is to provide the most complete information we can, so citizens can make the best decisions they can. This is essential to a functional democracy. In fact, the Founding Fathers of the United States considered an independent press so important that it is the only profession protected, by name, in the Constitution.
For the past nine years, HIJ has served the community as a small, locally-owned newspaper. Then, as now, most local news coverage was provided by Stephens Media Group, a conglomerate of approximately 65 newspapers nationwide that is ultimately controlled from the company's headquarters in Las Vegas. On this island they owned both daily papers and a few smaller ones.
When the Journal started, the two Stephens dailies – West Hawaii Today and Hawaii Tribune-Herald — seldom ventured far from either Kailua-Kona or Hilo, respectively. The activities and concerns of people in Ka'u, Hamakua, Puna and other areas were ignored or, at best, underreported. To an extent, that has changed. We believe that the fact that the dailies are doing a bit better in covering these previously forgotten districts is a direct result of the Journal's example.
We morphed from Ka'u Landing into the Journal in 1998, and by 2005 were publishing biweekly, ultimately distributing 24,000 copies of each issue island wide. Over the years we'd built a reputation of looking deeper into local issues than the dailies did. We took the time to investigate without the pressure of daily deadlines, nor the requirement that a reporter write one story per day.
The Journal grew steadily, and eventually began getting attention beyond this island. Last summer in Honolulu we received top honors from the Hawaii Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for Best Community Reporting and Best Feature Writing. We won two of the four statewide categories we were eligible for. During the year no other Hawai'i Island paper was considered the best in any category. We were batting .500 -- not bad in any league. Then just last month, on our third attempt, we were accepted into the highly selective national organization the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies.
Despite these journalistic successes, we faced challenges on the business side. To print a paper like ours requires a Web press, which can cost over $1 million. Through the country, daily newspapers are the ones that an afford this expensive equipment. But their presses are busy only a few hours a day printing the paper. To maximize revenue from this expensive asset, virtually every newspaper company in the country takes on additional contract printing jobs in their off hours. For example, the New York Times press always printed the New York City phone book, and dozens of other outside jobs. It's standard in the industry.
Stephens Media owns the only two Web presses on this island, where they print the Trib-Herald and West Hawaii Today. Lane Wick, HIJ's previous owner, approached Stephens with a contract job to print the Journal. Their response: We'll only print the Journal if you sell us a controlling interest. As a believer in independent journalism, Wick turned them down. With the new publisher, it was the same story – we won't print you unless we own you. The Journal continued to be printed in Honolulu at the Star-Bulletin press.
Although they couldn't buy us, Stephens still wanted a monopoly. A year and a half ago they launched Big Island Weekly, a copycat paper specifically created to drive the Journal out of business. They pursued a strategy similar to the one go! airlines used against Aloha Air. Sell the product – be it advertising space or airline tickets – below cost, and make up the shortfall with cash infusions from the parent company on the mainland. Since the local company has to actually earn the money it costs to operate, keep it up and you'll eventually drive them out of business.
I'd like to make it perfectly clear that the local staffers of Big Island Weekly have nothing to do with this strategy of their bosses. Like the local go! Airlines workers, they're happy to have a job here doing something they enjoy. But make no mistake: just because the local BIW employees didn't know what their bosses on the mainland were up to doesn't mean it wasn't happening. It most certainly was. And a news monopoly serves no one – except, of course, the one holding the monopoly.
This isn't the only place independent newspapers are being attacked like this. In San Francisco, the Bay Guardian newspaper has been publishing every week for almost 40 years. A few years ago a media conglomerate came in from out of town. They launched the competing San Francisco Weekly and sold extremely cheap advertising. The Bay Guardian sued, charging the Weekly was using predatory pricing and cash infusions from the parent corporation intended to unfairly damage their paper. A court agreed and awarded the Bay Guardian $15 million in damages. The ruling stood on appeal.
Besides being targeted by Stephens, the Journal also faced industry-wide challenges. Like all other newspapers – free or paid – the bulk of our revenue came from advertising. Industry wide, newspaper classified ad revenues dropped 5% last year – a continuing trend over the past decade. Print ads were similarly affected nationally.
So what now? Do the people of this island want and deserve multiple news sources? We think they do. Are they content to get all their local news from one off-island company that owns both our dailies, the only commercial TV station and most of the other papers? We think not. I believe people here are smarter than that and want more than that.
Despite their best efforts, corporate media hasn't managed to control everything yet. Blogging is still in its infancy, but locally Hunter Bishop, Aaron Stene and others are giving us online alternatives to the monopoly, as does the new Island Sun.
As for the Journal, it may not be completely dead after all. I was off-island at the beginning of a long-planned vacation when the publisher called and said she was suspending publication. Since then I've been overwhelmed with calls and emails of support – strongly urging us to carry on. A number of investors are in discussion to buy the paper and relaunch publication. Anyone interested in participating in this effort, or anyone with any questions is welcome to contact me at SaveTheJournal@mac.com. As I've always said, I love hearing from readers.
Mahalo for your attention and for this opportunity to speak here.
Peter Serafin
Editor
Hawai'i Island Journal
SaveTheJournal@mac.com
Posted on Wednesday, July 2, 2008 at 07:38AM by Hunter Bishop | Post a Comment
View Printer Friendly Version
Monday, June 30, 2008
Bishop vs. Walden
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.
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.
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
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