Borders Hilo: The Last Month

Borders Books in Hilo will close 21 August. I'll try to document its last month of operation, and share some memories.

31 July update: The headline from today's Hawaii Tribune-Herald:

Walgreens May Move Into Border's [sic] Building

An excerpt:

Walgreens, a nationwide drugstore chain that arrived in Hawaii in 2007, is planning its first Big Island store, a Hawaii County administrator has confirmed.

"It's You", Stevie Wonder-Dionne Warwick Duet

Even a minor Stevie Wonder song is better than most songs by most artists. This one, a duet with Dionne Warwick, is lovely.

The Case for Rail

in the August issue of The American Conservative:

The Case for Rail
For half a century, Washington has subsidized road socialism and stranded us all.

William S. Lind: What’s so conservative about federal highways?

Glen Bottoms: Keeping costs under control

Christopher B. Leinberger: Private development can fund public infrastructure.

John Norquist: Why cities still matter

John Robert Smith: Saving downtowns

Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?

asks Kunstler.

The reality I spend these days rambling the river with is the reality of a nation riding a great wave of entropy into the unknown. Only at this stage of the ride can we indulge in our Goth fantasies of the charming vampire nether-life. Believe me, when things really get dark we will all be wishing desperately for something more like lambs-in-the-meadow and the kindly touch of a loving hand and the dim memory of what it was like to care about anything or anyone.

Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss... and decided that we liked what we saw in there.

Bret Easton Ellis on "Tavis Smiley"

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/201006/20100629_ellis.html?vid=1534066991#video

A telling comment, from a 2009 Investor's Business Daily editorial by Newt Gingrich and Steve Everley.

http://www.investors.com/newsandanalysis/Article.aspx?id=508513

And recently, in the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced they had made a huge new discovery of oil, estimated to be as large as the biggest oil-producing spots in the Gulf, which means it could supply as much as 300,000 barrels of oil per day.

It's just too bad that oil is being "supplied" without a container.

"Be a Father to Your Child"

Happy Father's Day to those who are fathers to their children.

Lookalikes: Glenn Beck and Stephen Harper

Collapsing the Hard Way

is what America is doing, says Kunstler.

The Return of the Airships

Sprawled Out

http://fullyarticulated.typepad.com/sprawledout/

I need to read this more. It looks interesting.

Patti LaBelle: If You Asked Me To

Yesterday, while helping clean out a closet, mainly by lifting heavy boxes of books, I took breaks by watching G4's "Movies That Don't Suck", including Licence to Kill. As the end credits began to roll, I heard the opening strains of a very familiar song, Celine Dion's breakout hit, "If You Asked Me To." But this is the original version, which Patti LaBelle recorded for the movie soundtrack. Though overshadowed by Dion's rendition, LaBelle's is far superior in my view. What do you think?

Ethnic Diversity in America

The Census Bureau has just released its 2009 National and State Characteristics Population Estimates.

The Wall Street Journal reports.

USA Today article.

Kunstler on the BP-made disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and how it relates to the Long Emergency.

For the moment we can only speculate on what the still-unresolved incident will mean for America's oil supply. The zeal to prosecute BP for something like criminal negligence has bestirred a Department of Justice comatose during the rape-and-pillage of the US financial system. BP may be driven out of business, but then what? The net effect of the oil spill, one way or another, will be the gradual shut-down of oil drilling activity in the Gulf of Mexico. New government supervision will make operations very costly, if not non-viable, and the surviving companies will probably pack up for the west coast of Africa where supervision is almost non-existent. Anyway you cut it, the US will produce less oil and import more -- and have to rely on the political stability of places like Angola and Nigeria, not to mention the simmering Middle East.

So far, also, the US has done nothing in the way of holding a serious national political discussion about the the most important part of the story: our pathological dependency on cars. I don't know if this will ever happen, even right up to the moment when the lines form at the filling stations. For years, anyway, the few public figures such as Boone Pickens who give the appearance of concern about our oil problem, end up down the rabbit hole of denial when they get behind schemes to run the whole US car-and-truck fleet on something besides gasoline.

This unfortunate techno-narcissism shows that almost nobody wants to think about living with fewer cars driving fewer miles. We're going to be dragged there kicking and screaming, but that's our destination, like it or not. All the effort now going into developing alt-fuels and "green" cars is just a form of "bargaining" on the Kubler-Ross transect of grief.

Traveling around the US, it's easy to understand our failure to come to grips with reality. The nation is fully outfitted for extreme car dependency. You go to places like Atlanta and Minneapolis and you understand how deep we're into this. We spent all our collective national treasure -- and quite a bit beyond that in the form of debt -- building the roadway systems and the suburban furnishings for that mode of existence. We incorporated it into our national identity as the American Way of Life. Now, we don't know what else to do except defend it at all costs, especially by waving the talismanic magic wand of techno-innovation.

The obvious remedy for the oil-and-car problem would be to live in walkable towns and neighborhoods served by the kind of public transit that people are not ashamed to ride in. But it may be too late for that. We're going to be a much poorer society from now on. We squandered the financial resources for that transition on too many other things. We're stuck with our investments in houses and their commercial accessories, built where they were built, and no Jolly Green Giant is going to pick them up and move them closer together in an artful way that adds up to real towns. A reorganization of American life will occur, but now it will be on much less deliberate terms, a much messier and more destructive operation, a default to the smaller scale by extreme necessity, with a lot of losses along the way. The Deepwater Horizon incident only hastens the process.

...
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I'll discuss a good article on the three main ways countries have responded and will respond to the peak oil phenomenon.

It's Newberry Medal!

Just a Rock n Roll Clown

Cf. "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" by David Lee Roth.

Rand Paul and Buddy

I'll delve into the Rand Paul situation later. Right now, I just wanted to post these pictures showing the haircuts of Rand Paul and Buddy the beagle from Where My Dogs At? It wasn't until yesterday, when I read Field Negro's crack on Rand Paul's hair, that I realized the similarity.

Good Riddance to Scoundrel Arlen Specter

Here's why.

But it was Specter-the-prosecutor who seemed to relish eviscerating Hill - to the horror of almost every woman watching. Thomas won confirmation and for years Hill had to hire a bodyguard because of serious death threats.

Every time I saw Arlen Specter on television after that, I got queasy. The man had no shame or even an understanding of how flat-out sexist he was. I confess that I was thrilled to see him defeated, especially with all the Democratic Establishment supposedly having his back.

Bret Easton Ellis Interviewed

To promote his latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms, due 15 June, Bret Easton Ellis has done interviews with Vice and Movieline.

The Movieline interview unfolds over five days this week.

Spring Blog Updating in Progress

I changed the background color to gray, which I hope is more readable. I'm still trying to get the hang of blog design, and may have nicer typefaces in the future.