Month: January 2010

Joe Moran:

Boredom is a modern notion: if our ancestors suffered from it, they didn’t call it boredom.

The verb ‘to bore’ was first used in the late 18th century, while the noun ‘boredom’ dates only from the mid-19th century. By then, it was often seen as an illness: in Bleak House, Charles Dickens refers to it as a “chronic malady”. The literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks traces a shift from 18th-century notions of boredom, which saw it as an individual’s personal responsibility or moral failing, to more modern notions which situated the sources of boredom outside the self. Spacks argues that this “reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power”.

Stuart Staniford:

I think the general topic of denial is very pertinent to any discussion of global risks.

When something is scary, people have an incentive to somehow avoid dealing with the facts… you have a psychological incentive to deny evidence that maybe the problem is not so severe after all… either ignoring the problem, or if that is no longer working, minimizing it, attacking the integrity of the proponents, etc.

Meanwhile, the other side is at risk of exaggerating the seriousness of the problem.

I didn’t find much in the way of scholarship on the general phenomenon – there’s lots of practical books on denial in addiction. Other than that, I guess we are still in denial about denial…

Naomi Klein:

There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled – the illegal invasions, the defiant defenses of torture, the tanking of the global economy.

But the administration’s most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence.

This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance.

And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell – or a brand – was approached with tremendous focus and precision.

She’s summarizing:

The Bush administration’s determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to “rebrand America” for an increasingly hostile world.

And these errors do not cease.

“We do not create, we discover.” – R. Buckminster Fuller:

The earth is a small spaceship.

The equator speeds around at 1000 miles and hour and the whole planet speeds around the sun at a speed of a million miles a day.

The rim speed of rotation of our galaxy is tremendous and the speed of the whole galaxy traveling through space is phenomenal.

The environment does work in preferred ways and finding those ways will make us a success. We need to live on the income not the capital.

No one is suggesting turning off the Internet, but you should know the opposite of ‘open’ is ‘theirs’.

David Axelrod:

To put the breathtaking scope of this irresponsibility in perspective, the Bush administration’s swing from surpluses to deficits added more debt in its eight years than all the previous administrations in the history of our republic combined.

U.S. rescue worker Sam Grey, of the Fairfax County Urban Search and Rescue, holds a monitor showing a woman, alive and conscious, buried under the collapsed University of Port-au-Prince. [MSNBC slideshow here]

Most of Dubai could be underwater by 2100.

Up to 85% of the population and 90% of the infrastructure at risk.

At the request of President Obama.

Winston Churchill:

Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

One of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009, says TIME, in vitro meat is the brainchild of Willem van Eelen, a Dutch businessman who nearly starved to death in a Japanese prison camp and became convinced that artificial meat would solve world hunger.

Pajamas Media dispels any notions that this is some sort of hoax, citing the very real and very sincere In Vitro Meat Consortium and the Orwellianly-named ‘New Harvest’.

‘Arguably, the production of cultured meat is less unnatural than raising farm animals in intensive confinement systems, injecting them with synthetic hormones, and feeding them artificial diets made up of antibiotics and animal wastes.’

Never part of a living animal, Wiki implies cultured meat could be much cheaper than conventional meat.

Scientists have succeeded in creating 1 cm long strips of meat thus a small pork chop would take 30 days of cell replication in the lab.

If industrial facilities prove possible, experts say growing meat in trays instead of raising animals would do wonders for the environment.

Hanna Tuomisto, who studies the environmental impact of food production at Oxford University said the new meat could theoretically lower greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95 percent and reduce land and water use by about 95 percent.

“There was no effort made to find any answer to the economic problems of the country, and it was just a no, no, no, and no discussion,” said Arlen Specter talking a bit about what he witnessed as a Republican. “But I feel free to tell you that I felt under tremendous pressure.”

1. Get a president elected by the narrowest of margins in a highly controversial manner.
2. Pass huge tax cuts for rich people.
3. Ignore warning signs about an imminent attack on the US.
4. In the wake of the attack, establish that everyone who opposes your policies is unpatriotic.
5. Start a war based on lies.
6. Spend domestically like drunken sailors.
7. Let an American city drown.
8. Ruin the economy.
9. Lose control of Congress.
10. Lose the presidency.
11. Then, once in opposition, make no effort whatsoever to help solve the problems you created, and instead put all your effort into making sure that the people who are at least trying to solve the problems can’t do so, ensuring that they get the blame.

The Hindenburg zeppelin ladders!

Bruce Judson:

How does our response to the Great Recession compare to the age of FDR? To date, the most innovative response to the financial crisis, and the ensuing national misery, has been….TARP?

I refuse to believe that our current situation is the best that America can accomplish.

I refuse to believe that we have truly harnessed the legendary ingenuity and resourcefulness of the American nation. I also believe there is a way to move forward and dramatically revitalize our suffering nation.

In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences. – Robert G. Ingersoll

The byproduct is a blizzard of budgets and strategies which are substantially meaningless. Everyone does ad hoc things to protect their ass and try to make the best of impossible targets and incompetent, arrogant leaders self-deluded about their own brilliance and control of what is really happening in the organization and the marketplace.

The chief ideologue of the Republican party, Rush Limbaugh:

1. “Haiti? You can’t even pick up a prostitute down there without genuine fear of Aids.”
2. “We’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the US income tax.”
3. The Haitian earthquake was “made to order” for Obama because it would allow the president to “burnish his credibility … with both light-skinned and black-skinned” African Americans.

At a Dominican Republic airport inspection, Limbaugh revealed he was carrying his bottle of Viagra.

This phenomenon known as the “Quarterlife Crisis” is as ubiquitous as it is intangible.

Unrelenting indecision, isolation, confusion and anxiety about working, relationships and direction is reported by people in their mid-twenties to early thirties who are usually urban, middle class and well-educated; those who should be able to capitalize on their youth, unparalleled freedom and free-for-all individuation. They can’t make any decisions, because they don’t know what they want, and they don’t know what they want because they don’t know who they are, and they don’t know who they are because they’re allowed to be anyone they want.

…
Attempts to manage the Quarterlife Crisis might be as banal as drinking a lot, doing a bunch of drugs, sleeping with idiots and myriad other kinds of self-flagellation, but broader attempts are made to find some sense of purpose.

…
Among the implicit promises made to this generation of twentysomethings was that they would have work that was engaging and creatively fulfilling.

OMB Director Peter Orszag

This afternoon, I will participate in the White House Forum on Modernizing Government. More than 50 of the nation’s leading CEOS are attending today’s forum, bringing their ideas for how the government can use technology to save money and improve performance.

Posted only in case you’re glued to cable, and thereby a member of history’s unattending.

Higher levels of plastic is associated with heart disease, again.

Roughly 10 percent of men aged 60 or older who were among the top third in BPA concentrations developed cardiovascular disease compared with roughly 7 percent of similarly aged men with the lowest BPA concentrations.

Druid’s arch-whatever speaks:

Glance back through American history from colonial times to the present and you’ll discover that the one consistently effective strategy for citizens who seek to change the direction of their society is to organize.

When Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America not long after the Revolution, one of the things he found most remarkable about the new republic was the way that ordinary citizens who wanted to bring change to their society did it by organizing societies, lodges, movements, political parties, or any other kind of citizen’s group you care to name. The same thing has been true ever since; glance back along any wave of change in American life and you’ll find an organized group of citizens behind it.

It’s popular to insist these days that such organizations can’t possibly muster the clout needed to overwhelm, say, the power of big corporations. History says otherwise. In the 1880s, for example, corporations had even more unrestricted power in the United States than they do now, and the railroad corporations were the richest and most powerful of the lot. The Grange, an organization of farmers, took on the improbable task of breaking railroad monopolies that were forcing farm families into poverty by keeping the cost of shipping farm produce to urban markets artificially high. The short version? The Grange achieved total victory, and the railroad corporations lost the monopoly status that made their fortunes.

He was separating prime from cull. What’s unknown about him was his pain. Well before the War, Gordon Gibson urged a hundred loggers and you bet most conversations were misery and lament, all the good reasons to fail. Thousands of tons of wooden airplane wings had never been harvested before and never shipped. Nobody believed it was possible. Everybody knew it was impossible. Facts to raise to the roof. But within a year and a half, Gibson invented vertical logging. Floating into Northwest coves, complete with bunks and kitchens, his crowd of gypsy fellers pulled the strongest fir and pine and vigorous spruce downhill to ship to England, to keep the promise of Commonwealth, to fly the Spitfire against Hitler.

Yes. Things can be achieved. Tha’s all I’m sayin’.

LA Times:

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said “the public interest weighs in favor of providing access to the courts”.

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said not.

All 50 states allow cameras in courtrooms, but from the high court on down, cameras have been banned for decades.

‘well’ of course

The brute of reality continues:

In the next 10 years, the United States will use the fracturing technology to drill hundreds of thousands of new wells astride cities, rivers and watersheds. Cash-strapped state governments are pining for the revenue and the much-needed jobs that drilling is expected to bring to poor, rural areas.