This really doesn’t have anything to do with green… wait. Yes it does. Aren’t we all tin horns when we start out making something?
At any rate, my new novel is now available via Kindle,
What water are the water greatest water global challenges?
Did I say water? In England they call them ‘hosepipe bans’ but it seems our language brethren are experiencing a wee problem with drought:
The south-east of England and East Anglia are already in the grip of the UK’s worst drought in 30 years. Seven water companies have indicated that they will impose hosepipe bans. Most will begin next month, but some could start earlier.
This in a country known as having one of the wettest and dampest climates in the Northern Hemisphere. So it’s a bit weird to think of the UK in terms of drought. But there it is. Weird = new normal.
And maybe we can begin to understand what drought is like in parts of the world that are not historically wet, which have a lot of people and (already) very little water. It has been happening for years, with tragic consequences for man, land and beast.
Whining about Obama
He is the glass half-filled, half-empty, trying to do too much, done too little, he’s too different from us, too similar, too cautious, too radical… the President is the ultimate Rorschach. But if you want to take a look at what he’s actually done, there’s a top 50:
1. Passed Health Care Reform: After five presidents over a century failed to create universal health insurance, signed the Affordable Care Act (2010). It will cover 32 million uninsured Americans beginning in 2014 and mandates a suite of experimental measures to cut health care cost growth, the number one cause of America’s long-term fiscal problems.
2. Passed the Stimulus: Signed $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009 to spur economic growth amid greatest recession since the Great Depression. Weeks after stimulus went into effect, unemployment claims began to subside. Twelve months later, the private sector began producing more jobs than it was losing, and it has continued to do so for twenty-three straight months, creating a total of nearly 3.7 million new private-sector jobs.
3. Passed Wall Street Reform: Signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) to re-regulate the financial sector after its practices caused the Great Recession. The new law tightens capital requirements on large banks and other financial institutions, requires derivatives to be sold on clearinghouses and exchanges, mandates that large banks provide “living wills” to avoid chaotic bankruptcies, limits their ability to trade with customers’ money for their own profit, and creates the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (now headed by Richard Cordray) to crack down on abusive lending products and companies.
The Republicans must try to tear him down – it’s their only chance. Restless progressives and others (I’m endeared of the term ‘totebaggers’ as wielded at BJ and elsewhere) have no excuse other than cynical ennui. Get a hobby, but support the skinny black guy taking names in the toughest job on the list.
Graphic Inequality
So… after stumbling upon a rather devastating piece by Hitchens on JFK and the Camelot business, I’ve been mining some other back issues of the Atlantic that I found around the house – must’ve had a subscription in 2006. I am no fan of that magazine – the trove seems to run out in 2007 – but this piece on inequality by Clive Crook is worth mentioning for a few reasons, not the least of which is the above graphic and his use of the 1% coinage from this, several years back. Surely things have gotten better, right?
In 1971, Jan Pen, a Dutch economist, published a celebrated treatise with a less-than-gripping title: Income Distribution. The book summoned a memorable image. This is how to think of the pattern of incomes in an economy, Pen said (he was writing about Britain, but bear with me). Suppose that every person in the economy walks by, as if in a parade. Imagine that the parade takes exactly an hour to pass, and that the marchers are arranged in order of income, with the lowest incomes at the front and the highest at the back. Also imagine that the heights of the people in the parade are proportional to what they make: those earning the average income will be of average height, those earning twice the average income will be twice the average height, and so on. We spectators, let us imagine, are also of average height.
Pen then described what the observers would see. Not a series of people of steadily increasing height—that’s far too bland a picture. The observers would see something much stranger. They would see, mostly, a parade of dwarves, and then some unbelievable giants at the very end.
As the parade begins, Pen explained, the marchers cannot be seen at all. They are walking upside down, with their heads underground—owners of loss-making businesses, most likely. Very soon, upright marchers begin to pass by, but they are tiny. For five minutes or so, the observers are peering down at people just inches high—old people and youngsters, mainly; people without regular work, who make a little from odd jobs. Ten minutes in, the full-time labor force has arrived: to begin with, mainly unskilled manual and clerical workers, burger flippers, shop assistants, and the like, standing about waist-high to the observers. And at this point things start to get dull, because there are so very many of these very small people. The minutes pass, and pass, and they keep on coming.
By about halfway through the parade, Pen wrote, the observers might expect to be looking people in the eye—people of average height ought to be in the middle. But no, the marchers are still quite small, these experienced tradespeople, skilled industrial workers, trained office staff, and so on—not yet five feet tall, many of them. On and on they come.
Excited Particle Physicists
Abbreviations. Violations. Sometimes science has everything.
Physicists have long suspected that a difference in the properties of matter and antimatter is key to the early universe’s survival. Such a difference—technically known as charge-parity (CP) violation—would have allowed normal matter to prevail over antimatter so that normal matter could go on to form all of the stuff we see in the universe today.
To witness CP violation, physicists study particles to see if there is any difference in the rate of decay between normal particles and their antiparticles. The accepted theory of elementary particles, the standard model, allows for a low level of CP violation—including that revealed in the discoveries of the 1960s and 2000s—but not enough to explain the prevalence of normal matter. So researchers have been trying to find cases in which CP violation is higher.
The LHCb detector at CERN, and CDF at Fermilab, are two such experiments. They trace the paths of D0 meson particles and their antiparticles. These can decay into pairs of either pions or kaons, and by tallying these decay products, the LHCb and CDF teams can calculate the difference in decay rates between the D0 particles and antiparticles.
…
The results cannot be claimed as a bona fide discovery, which requires a statistical significance of 5 sigma—or the chance of it being random at less than one in a million. Still, particle physicists are excited. “We cannot yet say for sure it is CP violation,” says Angelo Carbone, a member of the LHCb collaboration. “But it’s close.”
What have you done today to ensure the universe’s survival, huh?
Don’t think so
Climate games seem to take a turn for the weird, but not really:
At the beginning of 2012, I received an anonymous document in the mail describing what appeared to be details of the Heartland Institute’s climate program strategy. It contained information about their funders and the Institute’s apparent efforts to muddy public understanding about climate science and policy. I do not know the source of that original document but assumed it was sent to me because of my past exchanges with Heartland and because I was named in it.
Given the potential impact however, I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name. The materials the Heartland Institute sent to me confirmed many of the facts in the original document, including especially their 2012 fundraising strategy and budget. I forwarded, anonymously, the documents I had received to a set of journalists and experts working on climate issues. I can explicitly confirm, as can the Heartland Institute, that the documents they emailed to me are identical to the documents that have been made public. I made no changes or alterations of any kind to any of the Heartland Institute documents or to the original anonymous communication.
There are no rules for playing fairly. That was a period, right after that ‘y’. But the political landscape is laid all the more bare when the opposition (to climate change?) observes nothing but the mantle of lies, obfuscation and dependency on liberals to preserve rational debate:
You can’t have a”rational public debate” with people whose whole reason for existence is to obfuscate the truth by paying big bucks to scientist/whores for whom ‘scientific inquiry’ means first posing the question “How much does it pay?” to be followed (after a brief period of haggling) with “What do you want it to say?”. From there corporate fronts like the Cato Institute, the Hoover Institute, the Heritage Foundation take the scientific 3-card monte game that has been handed to them and they round the edges, smooth out the rough spots, couch the language and cherry-pick the most easily digestible nuggets of bullshit which they dole out on 3×5 cards to Fox News, English tabloids, and an assortment of conservative bloggers and lesser whores who are paid to appear objective and thoughtful.
Anthony Shadid
Intrepid journalist Anthony Shadid died on Thursday while on assignment in Syria. If you don’t think you’re familiar with his work and you know anything at all about what has been going on in the Middle East over the last 15 years, you actually probably have read quite a bit of his reporting. A tremendous loss.
Here is Nature has No Culture, an article he co-authored with Shiva Balaghi, about Abbas Kiarostami after he received the Akira Kurosawa Lifetime Achievement Award at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2000.
A battered SUV rumbles across a country road, winding through wheat fields. We hear a conversation between the passengers, who are trying to decipher the vague driving directions they’ve been given for finding a small village tucked in the hillside. They are to take a turn just beyond the solitary tree. As they drive along, they pass a majestic free-standing tree, its branches sprawled against a crisp cloudless sky. Moments later, they pass another solitary tree — and then another and another. Which of these trees marks the spot, they wonder? So begins Abbas Kiarostami’s latest film, The Wind Will Carry Us (1999). Perhaps more than any other, this Kiarostami film treats the Iranian countryside as a character and not a placid backdrop. The landscapes — the contrasting colors of earth and sky, the stalks of wheat delicately moving to the breeze, the trees dotting the hillside — appear in characteristically long, uncut wide shots.
The title of the film is taken from the poetry of Forugh Farrokhzad and in a pivotal scene of the film, Forugh’s poem is recited. A leading feminist poet who rose to prominence in the 1960s, Forugh drew on nature to construct strikingly visual metaphors describing the complexities of her quest for independence as a woman writer in Iran. At times, she depicted herself in her poetry as enclosed and detached, watching the world through the frame of a window. Yet Forugh’s most evocative statement of intellectual and personal growth came in a verse where she exclaimed that she would plant her hands in the garden and grow. In Forugh’s writings, nature and the garden, common tropes in classical Persian poetry, came to represent the elemental quality of gender politics, the unnaturalness of restrictions on women’s lives. Kiarostami draws on and extends Forugh’s interpretation of nature in both his film and photographs.
The photographs exhibited in Manhattan in spring 2000 echo scenes from The Wind Will Carry Us. Though they are not film stills or location shots, Kiarostami said there is little difference between his filmmaking and photography. In the end, he sees their qualities merging.
“The nature that is in the location of my films can be seen in my photography, and I want my films to become closer to my photography and more distant from storytelling,” he said. “It is true that these are completely separate milieus, but in my opinion, the ideal situation for me is for these two areas — photography and cinema — to become closer to one another.”
Long before he began his career as a filmmaker, Kiarostami trained as a painter at the School of Fine Arts at Tehran University. He went on to work as a graphic artist and as a commercial director. In 1969, one of his commercials caught the eye of Firuz Shirvanlu, the director of the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults. Kiarostami was asked to establish a film division at the center. In 1970, he produced his first film, a short entitled Bread and Alley. [1] Since then, Kiarostami has directed nearly 30 films and has come to the attention of some of the leading figures of world cinema. [2] Akira Kurosawa has said, “When Satyajit Ray passed on, I was very depressed. But after seeing Kiarostami’s films, I thanked God for giving us just the right person to take his place.” [3]
In his films, Kiarostami has explored the relationship between fiction and reality, the subjectivity of truth as framed by the camera’s lens. Resisting a comfortable narrative, Kiarostami challenges the viewer to engage with his films, rather than to view them passively. Photography, which he took up during the revolution at a time that he doubted his future as a filmmaker, offers him another way to interact with his audience; they are called on to actively participate in the generation of meaning in Kiarostami’s art. [4]
“I prefer the gaze of a viewer in front of a photograph to the kind of gaze that an audience of my films has in a theater,” Kiarostami said. “The expectation of a viewer in the theater is to look for the continuities and changes in a story. He has grown accustomed to sitting in a theater and listening to a story. But in a gallery, I have seen that the viewers look at each single photograph, their gaze is more focused on the photograph, because they do not expect to hear a story.”
Like his films, his photographs are presented without expected guideposts that explain their significance. There are no labels, no titles, no dates. It is left to the viewer to lend them a particular meaning. Though it may appear that his lens reveals an unchanging and placid nature, Kiarostami’s photographs, in fact, seem to reveal a deeply political use of the landscape. “Photographs of nature are universal,” he said. “A tree has no ethnicity, no birth certificate, no passport, no nationality, therefore what difference does it make where in the world this tree is? What is important is the similarity between all trees, the similarity between all skies, the similarity between all landscapes. Nature has no specific culture. I am emphasizing this lack of ethnicity of nature. Therefore I do not want to mark the specific time and place of my photographs.”
Gross Compensation
A really bad* article in New York Magazine this week about how our terrifyingly Galt superbankers have a sad because… oh, paging Taibbi. Thank you, sir:
When I read things like this I’m simultaneously amazed by two things. The first is the unbelievable tone-deafness of people who would complain out loud, during a time when millions of people around the country are literally losing their homes, that their bonuses – not their total compensation, mind you, but just their cash bonuses, paid in addition to their salaries and their stock packages – are barely enough to cover the mortgage payments for their new condos, the taxis they take when walking is too burdensome, and their girlfriends with expensive tastes.
The second thing that amazes me is that Sherman is buying all this. I don’t know this reporter at all, and I’m happy to concede that he probably hangs out with more Wall Street people than I do. But I’m still in touch with plenty of people in the business, and I have yet to have any investment bankers crying on my shoulder about how the Dodd-Frank bill is forcing them into generic breakfast cereals.
Now, I’m sure if you put it to them the right way – “Hey, Mr. Habitually Overpaid Banker, do you think Barack Obama and the Dodd-Frank bill are ruining your bonus season?” – you’ll get a good percentage of people who’ll take that cheese and cough out the desired quote.
But in reality? Please. Wall Street people complain a lot, but in the last six months, the grave impact of Dodd-Frank on bonuses hasn’t even been within ten miles of the things these people are really panicked about. The comments I’ve heard have been more like, “My asshole has been puckered completely shut for four months in a row over this Europe business,” or, “If the ECB doesn’t come up with a Greek bailout package, I’m going to have to sell my children for dog food.”
*bad, as in pathetic, whining and, as Taibbi explains, exhibiting a very poor understanding of the article’s own subject and focus. And our banker superhero wealth creators don’t have the sense or sensibility to even deflect this line of questioning in a time of suffering by so many of their fellow citizens. I would say their liberal arts educations failed them, but of course you skip all of that unnecessary language, history, philosophy and humanities when you opt for b-school. Geniuses. It’s almost enough to make one a Calvinist. Almost.
NY mag is ridiculously trashy already, which I know because we have a subscription thanks to one of Mrs. G’s former interns who now works there. But this is quite a combination of unfiltered and mis-aimed fluffing that is so uninformed as to seem subversive. But it’s not.
Thanks, RB.
Birth of a Myth
Leo Hickman in the Guardian explains how climate deniers roll:
Such is the viral nature of information flow on the internet, we can sometimes see myths and memes developing before our very eyes. Just such an example has occurred over recent days with the rather irresistible news that windfarms can “increase climate change“.
The article that really gave this idea a push online was published on Sunday evening on the Daily Mail’s website. It was delivered with the headline: “Wind farms can actually INCREASE climate change by raising temperatures and causing downpours, warn academics.”
Somewhat predictably, that headline quickly attracted attention and was being disseminated with particular gusto on climate sceptic sites such as Climate Depot and JunkScience. The news was also reported on Dallasblog.com (“Wind Farms Cause Global Warming, some Scientists say”)
This is all of a piece with Krugman’s dictum, but there’s even more here, how a scientist’s research gets re-purposed, as they say. It’s stupid, really – giant wind farms can alter the weather. But the deniers don’t care about the stupid if it smells like proof; add the possibility of fantastic headlines and presto: a meme is born.
via LGM.
Pink and Green
So… very much of the intertubes is all Komen all the time over the past 24 hours. What I did not know is that their ridiculous disaster scripted right out of the Republican b-school leadership playbook coincides with the release of this film:
Unbelievable lack of awareness. As T-Bogg says, hubris or stupidity. And you don’t have to choose just one…