Month: May 2007

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of what is believed to be the heaviest chemical element yet known to science.

The new element has been named Governmentium.

Governmentium has 1 neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 11 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons.

Since governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of governmentium caused one reaction to take 4 days to complete when it would normally take less than a second.

Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2 to 4 years; it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, governmentium mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganization causes some morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes. This characteristic of moron-promotion leads some scientists to speculate that governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as Critical Morass.

Defining happiness is like defining insanity, but you know it when you see it.

Stumbling on Happiness is an award winning science book about what people do to make themselves happy.

…the science behind the pursuit of happiness – cognitive science and psychology – provides intriguing insights into human nature, helping us to understand why we make decisions…

Every happy person experiences the same feeling, but different things bring on that feeling.

Prime anthropological stuff:
The author is a leading researcher of ‘affective forecasting’, the prediction of emotional states – cognitive bias, empathy gap, impact bias, immune neglect…[wiki].

“People will rearrange their view of the world so it doesn’t hurt as much.

“What we fear is usually clear but we’re more often wrong than we are right when we try to achieve happiness.” [article at Harvard’s Gazette]

anthropology is from the Greek word ???????? = human

Now imagine the telephone call that will regret to inform you…
Now imagine the telephone call from Publishers Clearing House…

Is there any other country or system which in your opinion empowers ordinary people more than here in the United Kingdom?

Yes.Switzerland, Its broken down in small sections like say Manchester and Liverpool and these places are run like mini countries, they goven themselves, raise their own taxes and so on but all this is done by using the politicians worst nightmare the REFERENDUM, they use it on all major decisions so at the end of the day its the people who decide not some jumped up politician with a personal agenda to fulfill, and the politicians are all local so all of the decisions that are made effect them as well, not like our out of touch,nest feathering lot like we have, if we ran England like the Swiss rule their Country we would be the best Country in the world, so its simple REFERENDUMS are what we need
Posted by Mr Barnett on May 21, 2007

Newt Gingrich says religion hasn’t had a fair hearing.

Gingrich is stumping to the religious claiming religion has been denied a stump.

He’s saying that the increasing number of Americans tired of doe-eyed ideology and hamstrung rhetoric are radicals seeking to suppress morals and deny God. He says the increasing majority of Americans hoping to calm fervor and embrace civility are a dangerous secularism that will fog the Republican Progress.

A pale nonsense.

Firstly, I deny the man honor. Hiding his mistress, he stood on the moral bow of the ship of state while Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski were keelhauled. A messy period for Clinton and Lewinski and our nation. False and cheating days for the hypocritical Gingrich.

Second, he lifts no water. The legacy of Gingrich is argument, a terse opposing. Leadership material is no hack to fashion. Years pass and Gingrich fails to hold a worthy moment in either the nation or the world.

Not finally, his recent appearing as if a candidate to lead our nation is rife with poker. He’s in the news because he’s able to play friends and media from the deck of his favors, not because he instructs fair play, lifts sensible proposals or, heaven willing, promotes hope or good news.

Familiar with a process he helps create, he betrays himself in his own quotation:

…Gingrich derided the process by which Americans pick presidential nominees, saying that he will never participate in “game-show, 30-second-answer, so-called pseudo debates in both parties. . . . I am totally uninterested in applying for a game show as if this were ‘Bachelor’ or ‘American Idol.'” Washington Post

Pandering for votes, Gingrich is selling ‘Radical Secularism‘ as if selling glue to sloganeers. It’s the topic of the day for Republicans clamboring to revive numb loyalists.

Gingrich is building division once more.

“In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive,” Gingrich said, deriding what he called the “contorted logic” and “false principles” of advocates of secularism in American society.

“Basic fairness demands that religious beliefs deserve a chance to be heard,” he said during his 26-minute speech. “It is wrong to single out those who believe in God for discrimination.

“Yet, today, it is impossible to miss the discrimination against religious believers.”

Incredible nonsense!
As if our world of caustic difference and war isn’t sufficient evidence to move religion to the pew while we treaty a new framework of living together, Gingrich and his jingoists are dividing our nation merely for votes.

Government is a tool, just like a hammer.
You can use a hammer to build things,
or you can use a hammer to destroy. -Molly Ivins

Populist theism is opportunism at its core.

A politician known more for his focus on economic and cultural policies than on theology, Gingrich spent much of his speech on Saturday extolling the teachings of the Bible. He cited the book of Matthew, the book of Revelation and the Sermon on the Mount, and his own 2006 book, “Rediscovering God in America.”

Political leaders that see their role in moral terms deny us our public civility and our private conscience.

Following the death of Jerry Falwell, the New Yorker looked back to the penetration of religion into politics in a focus piece, Church and State. The article helps perspective and helps us realize that political ambition is not morality.

In the nineteen-twenties, after the Scopes trial, true fundamentalists declared themselves separationists. They would have nothing to do with the larger culture anymore. Some of them wouldn’t even speak with an evangelical who wasn’t a fundamentalist. And, except for local temperance or anti-gambling campaigns in the South, fundamentalists didn’t vote very much. They saw the end times coming, with the Rapture and Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ, so they said, “O.K., our job is to keep ourselves pure and await the Second Coming.” This was their eschatology, but it was also their reaction to the victory of modernist thinking in most Protestant denominations. They withdrew and became invisible, so that many people thought fundamentalism was dying out. Not so.

In the seventies, Falwell brought together a group of fundamentalist pastors who had independent churches to discuss what should be done. Then, in the late seventies and early eighties, he preached that Christians—by which he meant evangelical Christians—should engage in the world and save America from moral decline and secularism. He essentially said, “Look, we’ve made this false distinction between the sacred and the secular. In fact, everything is sacred. For too long we’ve left business to Wall Street and politics to the people in Washington. We need to train men of God to become lawyers and businessmen and members of Congress. We have to mobilize our people to turn this country around.”

It was this message that permitted fundamentalists and many conservative evangelicals, who at that time were moving much more into the middle class, to aspire to “worldly” success and to involve themselves in politics.

Religion is a person in church thinking about fishing.
Spirituality is a person fishing thinking about God.
– Gale Mcgaha Miller

Good sense has fair play

Religion is well supported; of various kinds, indeed, but all good enough; all sufficient to preserve peace and order: or if a sect arises, whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play, and reasons and laughs it out of doors, without suffering the state to be troubled with it. They do not hang more malefactors than we do. They are not more disturbed with religious dissensions. On the contrary, their harmony is unparalleled, and can be ascribed to nothing but their unbounded tolerance, because there is no other circumstance in which they differ from every nation on earth. They have made the happy discovery, that the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them. – Thomas Jefferson

Our system of food safety puts business “above the public welfare” asserts the chair of a National Academies committee that recommended major changes in the U.S. food safety system.

The executive branch has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods.

“This nation has – and has had for decades – a pressing need for a wholly dedicated food safety agency, one that is independent and not concerned with other matters to bring together and extend the bits of food safety activities now scattered over more than a dozen agencies.”

Four organizations comprise the National Academies:
the National Academy of Sciences,
the National Academy of Engineering,
the Institute of Medicine and
the National Research Council.

In the first four months of 2007, FDA inspectors – who are able to check out less than 1 percent of regulated imports – refused 298 food shipments from China.

Juices and fruits rejected as “filthy.”

Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption.

Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer.

Swordfish rejected as “poisonous.”

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

These were among the 107 food imports from China the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month… along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

Kowtowing to China
China is subject to more inspections because of its poor record… [but] For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught – many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

Under Agriculture Department rules, countries cannot export meat and poultry products to the United States unless the USDA certifies that the slaughterhouses and processing plants have food-safety systems equivalent to those here.

Much to its frustration, China is not certified to sell any meat to the United States because it has not met that requirement.

But that has not stopped Chinese meat exporters.

“So many U.S. companies are directly or indirectly involved in China now… the United States finds itself “kowtowing to China” …even as that country keeps sending American consumers adulterated and mislabeled foods. Article at Washington Post

Are we also kowtowing to companies?
Government may bend to business, but so do we.

Whether current government ideology favors a hands-off policy or is poorly funded, there are brands to blame and there are sufficient funds to improve food quality and safety.

• Amount spent annually by Kellogg’s to promote Frosted Flakes: $40 million
• Amount spent annually by the dairy industry on “milk mustache” ads: $190 million
• Amount spent annually by McDonald’s advertising its products: $800 million

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could not have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. – Abraham Lincoln

Telemarketing theft climbs to more than $622 million in under a year.

Data firms are selling names and data on elderly Americans to known lawbreakers. [story]

The thieves operated from small offices in Toronto and hangar-size rooms in India.

Every night, working from lists of names and phone numbers, they called World War II veterans, retired schoolteachers and thousands of other elderly Americans and posed as government and insurance workers updating their files.

Then, the criminals emptied their victims’ bank accounts.

Evidence of social isolation:

One victim, a 92 year old WWII veteran said, “I loved getting those calls. Since my wife passed away, I don’t have many people to talk with. I didn’t even know they were stealing from me, until everything was gone.”

A global criminal enterprise preying upon millions…

3.3 million “Elderly Opportunity Seekers”

4.7 million “Suffering Seniors”

In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission estimated that 11 percent of Americans over age 55 [!!] had been victims of consumer fraud.

The following year, the FBI shut down one telemarketing ring that had stolen more than $1 billion [!!], spanned seven countries and resulted in 565 arrests.

Buckets and buckets and buckets of treasure.

Hundreds of thousands of colonial-era silver and gold coins worth an estimated $500-million were recently brought from a shipwreck in the Atlantic.

The salvage firm Odyssey will not say exactly where nor name the ship and will not describe the type, denomination or country of origin of the coins except to say they are unused.

Packed in hundreds of plastic containers, the 50,000 coins are worth an average of $1,000 each. [AP story at Globe and Mail]

From the Odyssey Marine Exploration website, shipwreck.net:

In what is believed to be the largest collection of coins ever excavated from a historical shipwreck, Odyssey Marine Exploration recently recovered over 500,000 silver coins weighing more than 17 tons, hundreds of gold coins, worked gold, and other artifacts from the wreck of a Colonial period shipwreck code-named “Black Swan”, located in an undisclosed location in the Atlantic Ocean.

The work accomplished to date on this site has diligently followed archaeological protocols using advanced robotic technology, and the artifacts are now undergoing a meticulous conservation process by some of the world’s most experienced coin conservators.

Who will this bill?

There are post-Katrina legal claims approaching $300 billion against the Army Corps of Engineers by tens of thousands of businesses, residents and the state of Louisiana. [story]

President Carter says President Bush’s administration is ‘the worst in history’.

“I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history,” Carter told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Listen to a clip from the interview
Copyright 2007, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc., by Frank Lockwood

During a telephone interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from the Carter Center in Atlanta, the ex-president also accused the current White House occupant of eliminating the line between church and state and of abandoning “America’s basic values.”

“The overt reversal of America’s basic values as expressed by previous administrations, including those of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon and others, has been the most disturbing to me.”

The 39th president said that during Bush’s two terms in office, he has radically departed from every other U.S. president.

Frank Lockwood conducted the interview May 18.
For more from this interview, visit Lockwood’s Blog at biblebeltblog.com

A story summary is at Interest Alert

In a separate BBC interview, Carter also denounced the close relationship between Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“Abominable. Loyal, blind, apparently subservient,” Carter said when asked how he would characterize Blair’s relationship with Bush.

“I think that the almost undeviating support by Great Britain for the ill-advised policies of President Bush in Iraq have been a major tragedy for the world.” [Washington Post]

Update:
As if bloggers are journalists and should watch their ethics and errors, I’m posting text from a TV interview where Jimmy Carter is clarifying his statements, narrowing his criticism:

MS. VIEIRA: I was saying, you said your remarks might have been careless. Are you saying now that you believe they were careless or reckless?

PRESIDENT CARTER: Well, I think they were, yes, because they were interpreted as comparing this whole administration to all other administrations, when what I was actually doing was responding to a question about foreign policy between Richard Nixon and this administration. And I think that this administration’s foreign policy, compared to President Nixon’s, was much worse.

MS. VIEIRA: But not the worst in U.S. history?

PRESIDENT CARTER: No, that’s not what I wanted to say. I wasn’t comparing this administration with other administrations back through history, but just with President Nixon’s.

But there’s always a but:

AP writes: “In audio posted Saturday on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Web site, an interviewer asked Carter “which president was worse, George W. Bush or Richard Nixon?” In his response, Carter gave the broader answer, calling the Bush administration ‘the worst in history.’

Frank Fellone, deputy editor at the Democrat-Gazette, said Carter knew the telephone interview was recorded. He described the newspaper’s story as ‘accurate and also contextual.'” [link to Frank Lockwood’s blog]

There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.

Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.

There is no logical reason to use a drop of fuel, or a watt of energy, to heat or cool any home or building attached to the Earth.

Just below the surface, within reach of the average basement, is an infinite reservoir of heat that never drops below 50° F.

The night-day cycle is more than ample to raise that temperature into the comfort zone, with a simple shift in Time. The use of daytime heat at night, and nighttime cool by day, is made possible by Thermal Inertia, and the engineered Lag-in-Time is a property of the thickness and Specific Heat of the solid wood walls.

Michael Sykes’ “Enertia” building system traps solar energy to produce homes that heat and cool themselves.

The system contains spaces between the walls that are connected to a sunspace that stores solar and geothermal energy.

That sunspace contains cellulose, lignin and resin seeded with mineral crystals that release thermal energy over time to heat a home. During warmer months, the process is reversed and the structure instead absorbs heat from home appliances and people in the home.

An air flow and access channel, or Envelope, runs around the building, just inside the walls – creating a miniature biosphere. Here solar heated air circulates, pumping and boosting geothermal energy from beneath the house, storing it in the massive wood walls. Thermal inertia causes the house to “float” between the cycles of night and day, and even between the seasons.

“When I first became aware of the greenhouse effect, I was surprised to learn that the building and heating of homes was the biggest user of fossil fuels,” Sykes said in a statement.

Although the Enertia system uses new and advanced methods, the use of natural air movement has long been known to be a positive approach to energy conservation.

I designed a home for South Lake Tahoe using the convection envelope method in 1977. The plan angled the house on the lot in order to orient the longest part of the design toward the sun for full exposure. Heat-absorbing metal roof panels were elevated above the roof cladding to create a vast air duct – an air furnace. The rear, colder wall of the home was a hollow, two foot air duct to create a wall-size space for downward return air during winter. The flowing air from the rear wall fell over a crawlspace filled with tons of clean boulders to hold heat in their thermal mass. A system of automatic temperature sensitive greenhouse-style slats controlled air movement near the roofline and at the floor. In the hottest of summer, the heated air would vent upward and outward at the ridge, pulling colder ground air into the home from underneath the bottom flooring.

The house was built, but without these solarized innovations. It was too difficult to get a permit from the town and to convince the owners and their contractors to follow through with this unusual approach to reducing power bills.

“We discovered that a modest increase of 10% green space reduced surface temperatures in the urban environment by 4°C, which would overcome temperature rises caused by global warming over the next 75 years, effectively ‘climate proofing’ our cities.”

“Such a reduction has important implications for human comfort and health within urban areas and opportunities need to be taken to increase green space cover wherever structural changes are occurring within urban areas, as well as planting street trees or developing green roofs.”

“Urban areas can be up to 12°C warmer than more rural surroundings due to the heat given off by buildings, roads and traffic, as well as reduced evaporative cooling, in what is commonly referred to as an ‘urban heat island’…” [link]

Should Farmers Come Back to Towns?

Salt Lake in the summer.
The red (hot) area on the left is downtown; cool green squares are parks, golf courses, and cemeteries.

“Cooling Los Angeles by 4 degrees,” says Hashem Akbari, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory who specializes in ‘cool communities’ technology, would have the same effect as turning all of the on-road vehicles into electric cars. This is so huge, nothing else compares.”

From a previous post: We cook ourselves…

There are statistical tidbits and there are statistical tidbits.

This statistical tidbit truly thunders sensibility…

A record number of people are surviving organ transplants in this country – but sadly, almost all of them are getting skin cancer. In fact, the risk of getting skin cancer is up to 250 times higher for a transplant survivor than it is for the rest of us. [link to story]

Learning thrives on questions that challenge consensus.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. – John Fitzgerald Kennedy

There is no universally accepted theory as to what the word “existence” means.

Literally, it means “standing out”…wiki

It’s really hard to get people into your investor pipeline. It’s even harder to get a check from them. But if you can keep them tuned into you, your business and the market over time, you not only keep them reminded of your existence, you also have the best opportunity to engage them further and further into your project until at some point, they pull out the checkbook. – Jordan Mitchell

Being and, therefore, responsive to Being.

We humans are disturbingly willing to cause pain.

Altruism and hierarchy
A famous study – Obedience to Authority: An Experimental Overview – performed after World War II, showed that humans willingly induce torture “to give harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because an authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment.”

According to at least one other study involving empathy, and an awareness of other’s pain, humans tested much worse in morality than other primates.

An old post at Teardrop Souffle is about our gravely self-serving assumptions about being the pinnacle of evolution.

“We picture our own species as the greatest achievement of and ultimate reason for billions of years of evolution. This way of thinking – the idea of making positive evolutionary progress and being purposeful, is called ‘teleology‘.

“If we humans are at all moral as we fancy ourselves to be… we’d start to see that animals are not only capable of feeling intense pain, but also feeling intense empathy and concern for pain in others.

Animals and altruism
Essentially a scientific text, Good Natured: The Origins of Good and Evil in Humans and other Animals is devoted to morality across species. Is morality a biological or cultural phenomenon?

“This work succeeds most of all by gradually eroding invisible assumptions about morality as an exclusively human prerogative.

“For some readers this might be a kind of Copernican Revolution against the absolute centrality of human beings in the moral universe.

“We are not alone: we have moral ancestry and moral companionship…

Hippocrates is not the father of medicine.

“Documents dating back 3,500 years [prove] that the origins of modern medicine lie in ancient Egypt and not with Hippocrates and the Greeks.

“The research team from the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology at The University of Manchester discovered the evidence in medical papyri written in 1,500BC – 1,000 years before Hippocrates was born.” [link to Science blog]

At the Whitehouse to pay tribute to Tony Blair, Condoleezza Rice made a comment about ‘how we view historic events before and after they happen’:

“At the time, it seems impossible…to future generations it will always seem just inevitable.”

In what seemed to be a reference to Iraq, Dr Rice said that it was

“good to have an example of people overcoming their differences” in a place where “differences were a licence to kill”.

Although this post by UK journalist Toby Harnden is discussing other matters, primarily Tony Blair’s domestic legacy, I thought these quotes from Secretary Rice reveal a part of the policy thinking and personal conviction behind current war policy.

First revealed by the Aspen Times a month earlier, the ‘Arkansas Democrat’ newspaper published the cause of global warming April 16, 2007.

Watts at NorCalBlogs covered the news flash, but major media outlets have failed to syndicate the piece, although it’s recently been authenticated by Snopes Verfication.

In the long view, the big picture, the overall, everything sucks.

“Who Are the Merchants of Fear?”
“These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos.

[link from watts]

Good goal, bad policy.

In fact, ethanol will do little to reduce the large percentage of our fuel that is imported (more than 60%), and the ethanol policy will have widespread and profound ripple effects on other markets.

Corn farmers and ethanol refiners are ecstatic about the ethanol boom and are enjoying the windfall of artificially enhanced demand. [see tongue-in-cheek Corn Cartel post]

But it will be an expensive and dangerous experiment for the rest of us.

…it is no surprise that the price of corn has doubled in the last year — from $2 to $4 a bushel. We are already seeing upward pressure on food prices as the demand for ethanol boosts the demand for corn. Until the recent ethanol boom, more than 60% of the annual U.S. corn harvest was fed domestically to cattle, hogs and chickens or used in food or beverages. Thousands of food items contain corn or corn byproducts.

…any sort of shock to corn yields, such as drought, unseasonably hot weather, pests or disease could send food prices into the stratosphere.

…adding ethanol raises the price of fuel because it is more expensive to transport and handle.

Our politicians may be drunk with the prospect of corn-derived ethanol, but if we don’t adopt policies based on science and sound economics, it is consumers around the world who will suffer the hangover. [LA Times]

A new breed of caudillo – political authoritarian – is coming to power across South America.

More or less fairly elected, operating a coup from within, the whole of South America, with the sole exception of Colombia, is now in the hands of the populist Left.

They have a number of characteristics in common.

First, they are anti-yanquista, opposing trans-American free trade.

Second, they are big spenders…

Third, they are demagogues…

Fourth, these new authoritarians have genuine charisma.

Fifth, they are anti-politician politicians: Bonapartists, if you like.

Six: They are nationalists, railing against the international order.

Why does any of this matter to us?

For two reasons, one immediate and the other more abstract.

The immediate problem is that Latin America is ceasing to be part of what we think of as the Western World. Chávez and Morales in particular have aligned their countries with our enemies: their closest friends overseas are Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba and, to a lesser extent, Belarus.

Second: Democracy can easily be taken down. During the 1990s, with the partial exception of Fujimori’s Peru, every state in the region was a stable, liberal democracy. Now, bit by bit, that is ceasing to be true.

Our media has been ignoring analysis of the changes in South America for the most part, but Daniel Hannan, a seasoned journalist covering South America, writes a clear summary in The Telegraph imploring us to wake up before it’s too late.

My watch is one thousand million times more accurate than your watch.

Galileo satellite navigation and GPS satellites carry two types of clocks.

One will keep time with an accuracy of around one nanosecond (one one-thousand-millionth of a second) in 24 hours – equivalent to losing or gaining a second in 2.7 million years.

The other onboard clocks are accurate to 10 nanoseconds per day. In comparison, an ordinary digital wristwatch has an accuracy of about one second per day.

The 10 year Galileo program is a constellation of thirty satellites. It will be the first civilian positioning system to offer global coverage. Their accuracy will provide meter-wide positioning by measuring radio waves. Travelling at about 300 million meters per second, the radio wave covers a distance of around one-third meter in one nanosecond. [ScienceDaily]

An upcoming mercury clock is accurate to one second in about 400 million years – give or take a systemic perturbation or two.

Wealth was not determined by how much you had,
but by how much you had to give away.

The Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) are an Indigenous nation, numbering about 5,500, who live in British Columbia on northern Vancouver Island and the mainland.

The picture is Wawadit’la, also known as Mungo Martin House, a Kwakwaka’wakw “big house” with a totem, used for ceremonies known as potlatch.

Within the potlatch, hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, are observed and reinforced through the distribution of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. Status of families are raised by those who do not have the most resources, but distribute the resources. The host demonstrates their wealth and prominence through giving away the resources gathered for the event, which in turn prominent participants reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.

Their society was highly stratified, with three main classes, determined by heredity: nobles, commoners, and slaves. Their economy was based primarily on fishing, with the men also engaging in some hunting, and the women gathering wild fruits and berries. Ornate weaving and woodwork were important crafts, and wealth, defined by slaves and material goods, was prominently displayed and traded at potlatch ceremonies. European diseases drastically reduced the population during the late nineteenth-early twentieth century.

I’m not excited about the prognostications of power utility firms.

Since the ‘Lightbulb in Every Farm’ program of Westinghouse, through the graft battles of industrial and suburban rates and metering, while voting public bond after bond to underwrite coal, nuclear, natural gas and Jet-A machinery plus building their infrastructure, power utilities have only been innovative while sending us a fatter bill or using price to push innovation or conservation costs onto regional business and private consumers.

Over many years, power utilities have merely entertained us with futurist pledges that have never been delivered. I’ve heard it all before. A link to my previous rant.

Power Utilities remain entrenched in a psuedo-market. Our best hope is that a new grid of ‘distributed power generation’ will belong to its owners, alternative power producers that are kept at least an arms length from utility managers.

Our energy farms, our rooftops and hilltops, our upcoming regenerative ‘hybrids’, our future diversity must never to managed or regulated by these firms. The intertie challenges are not so great that a new marketplace is impossible.

I recommend that we keep the utilities restrained or we remove their privileges until they are deregulated in an open marketplace.

I wrote this post as a comment to reporting by Jon Lebowski at WorldChanging of a 2007 energy firm conference.