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Longview, Taking in the

An intense labor battle is happening in Longview, Washington, but it is not news so pay no attention.

One of the most determined local union struggles in recent times is unfolding on the waterfront at the Port of Longview. The struggle pits members and supporters of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) against EGT, a multinational consortium that built a $200 million grain terminal in Longview, largely with nonunion, out-of-town labor, and now seeks to operate it without employing ILWU members, in violation of its lease.

On July 11, up to 100 members and supporters of Longview’s 202-member ILWU Local 21 were arrested after demonstrators knocked down a chainlink fence and entered the terminal; arrestees included the presidents of ILWU locals in Vancouver and Portland. Then, after midnight on July 14, as many as 600 demonstrators gathered, and about 200 occupied train tracks to block a mile-long Burlington Northern Santa Fe train from delivering grain to the terminal. That prompted the railroad to say it would suspend deliveries while the dispute continued.

ILWU’s cause appears to have widespread support in Longview, a town of 37,000 with an economy centered on manufacturing, forest products, and the port. An initial print run of 800 support placards ran out in three or four days, said Local 21 President Dan Coffman; more are on the way. As many as 250 local businesses are displaying the signs, which read: “We Support the ILWU in the fight for a decent standard of living in our community.” Hundreds more appear in yards and vehicles.

Pickets and placards are the latest front in a four-year local battle with EGT LLC, the multinational consortium; the dispute is also in federal court.

EGT, which stands for Export Grain Terminal, is a joint venture run by the giant agribusiness multinational Bunge in partnership with Japan-based ITOCHU Corporation and South Korea’s STX Pan Ocean Co. Bunge, which reported a $2.4 billion profit for 2010, has a 51 percent controlling interest in the venture.

TUIF.

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Missing the Mark

So… it’s probably important to note how alternative energy antagonists fund misinformation and disseminate it into the public sphere.

In 2010, New Jersey passed the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act. This act “require[s] that a percentage of electricity sold in the State be from offshore wind energy” and will be financed through $100M in taxpayer subsidies. But is this a good deal for ratepayers? Americans for prosperity commissioned the Beacon Hill Institute to find out – and the results are devastating.

What’s devastating is how utterly easy it is for people with deep pockets to spread misinformation. Whether it’s taxes or creationism. All you need to do is syphon a few of your millions toward some pliant writers or scientists and suddenly you have bogus evidence! to pass around. Michael Conathan at TP:

  • The study dramatically underestimates the economic savings realized from the environmental benefits by assuming a static price for the valuation of reduction of greenhouse gasses – which will inevitably rise over time – and by applying an absurdly high discount rate of 10 percent to the benefits when most economic studies use rates of 3-5 percent.  The discount rate mistake alone could lead to underestimating the benefits of offshore wind by as much as 50 percent. (This Bloomberg article contains a concise description of how an excessively high discount rate dramatically undervalues future benefits.)
  • It also artificially inflates the costs of the project compared to fossil fuel generation by failing to account for the reality that as costs go up, people will reduce their consumption thereby partially offsetting the price increase. Furthermore, the study estimates the cost of natural gas and coal based on historical prices rather than based on forecasts of future market conditions. While natural gas prices are difficult to predict, experts believe coal prices will rise in the future.

And this isn’t some game for the vast majority, or even for the lucky few believe it is. The consequences of this kind suffused idiocy becoming dominant in our so-called culture provide all kinds of new growth opportunities, though not the good kind. When journalists get to be more coy about serious matters, politicians can be more craven on behalf of corporations that support them. Apparently, less 40% of Americans now believe in evolution. Ask yourself how that is even possible.

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Fracticality

Too much of some things and not enough of others. Why do we lose the feel for and sight of the sensations we hold most dear? Are we misusing the words and concepts? The battle for our own personal attention spans, for example, in which to play is to lose, doesn’t do anyone much good. What do those words even mean that we allow this ‘span’ (do we need an attention suspension bridge?) to be up for grabs The degree to which we allow almost anything to pass into our heads, refusing to rule and watch over this domain as we might a plot of land where our children sleep, contributes to the loss. As well, connectivity; we’ve bought lock-and-stock the idea that we should never (much less need to) be out of the reach of electronic beeps and chirps. Then there’s the wireless scourge. Harmless and helpful on its own, though at essence and by definition opposed to any efforts at moderation. So, how do you pan out, and if we manage, how do we make sense of what see?

One place to start making sense again, this essay on the misunderstandings of art and science by James Elkins, The Drunken Conversation of Chaos and Painting

Within mathematics, there is no question of the importance of the new discoveries. The “new geometry”
knows itself to be fundamental: “Euclid,” Benoit Mandelbrot announces in The Fractal Geometry
of Nature, will be “used in this work to denote all of standard geometry.” The unexpected efflorescence
of geometry, so difficult to follow through its growing associations with physics, biology, astronomy,
geology, medicine, and economics, already has wide experimental support and applications as diverse
as the threebody problem, population dynamics, the neurobiology of hearing, and the contractions
of heart muscle. It has, in addition, serious philosophic and experimental implications for the scientific
method itself.
In this context the “new geometry” is most interesting because it knows itself to be beautiful,
though the nature and extent of that knowledge are open to question. Mandelbrot quotes an article in Science
that makes a parallel between cubism, atonal music and modern mathematics beginning with “Cantor’s
set theory and Peano’s spacefilling curves.” He sees a rococo phase in mathematics before the modern
era, followed by a visual austerity. When it comes to art, he makes a poorly articulated and unconvincing
historical and aesthetic reading of his own fractal inventions, according to which the extravagant,
ebullient forms he has visualized are “minimalist art”—a most unlikely identification. There is also an
unwillingness on Mandelbrot’s part to mix art and science: when computer printouts are to be judged aesthetically,
he gives them selfparodistic titles such as “The Computer ‘bug’ as artist, Opus 1,” thereby publishing
aesthetic results as mistakes, “bugs” in programs. Part of the meaning of such titles resides in
Mandelbrot’s mimicry of contempory painting styles; “Opus 2” is like an angular Clifford Still or Franz
Kline. He also thinks his polychromic computer printouts are “austere.” The reason is they have simple
mathematics behind them, and so his misidentification with minimalism is an example of non-visual
thinking—what a mathematician would call “analytic” rather than “synthetic” reasoning. More plausibly,
he thinks a Mies van der Rohe building is a “scalebound” throwback to “Euclid” since it has only certain
classes of forms, while—in a particularly strange juxtaposition of cultures—“a high period Beaux Arts
building is rich in fractal aspects.”

Download and the read the whole thing. On purpose.

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Idealism and Urban Transmogrification

What do you get when you cross a major corporation with the do-gooder trendiness of a Major Art Establishment? Pleasure.

You can tell a lot from the language people use– as well as from the language they don’t use. An online visit to the “mobile” BMW Guggenheim Lab, which recently touched down on Houston Street and Second Avenue in all its up-to-the-minute minimalist splendor, suggests that the “international, interdisciplinary teams of emerging talents” running it are engaged in the paradoxical task of trying to discover “innovative” solutions to intractable urban problems while thinking solely in clichés.

The Web site itself is of course cheery and bright, featuring lots of baby blues, the usual self-promotional videos, fussy graphics, things to click on, and, of course, an Internet letter box in which you – an ordinary citizen! – can post your radical visionary ideas about how to improve the city without even buying a stamp.

The economy is almost beyond repair, world banks are facing a meltdown, entire segments of the population have been served with their divorce papers by any and all employers, but the Guggenheim’s site is full of madly utopian visions such as that eye-catching poster in which all of New York’s major buildings are squeezed into the rectangle usually occupied by Central Park, while the rest of the island becomes a green, pristine forest – much as it was before those horrid Europeans arrived in their high-tech wooden boats. Yeah, that’ll work. Just watch out for the bows and arrows.

Read the whole thing – it’s just darling, like feeling the future through a never-ending schedule of plastic glove symposia.

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Changing the Story

Probably not the kind of story you were looking for – though it’s flattering, until it isn’t. A.S. Byatt on Ragnarok. The nugget is in there – see if you can find it.

Myth comes from muthos in Greek, something said, as opposed to something done. We think of myths as stories, although, as Heather O’Donoghue says in her book From Asgard to Valhalla, there are myths that are not essentially narratives at all. We think of them loosely as tales that explain, or embody, the origins of our world. Karen Armstrong writes in A Short History of Myths that myths are ways of making things comprehensible and meaningful in human terms (the sun as a chariot driven by a woman through the firmament) and that they are almost all “rooted in death and the fear of extinction”.

Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, sees myths as dreamlike shapes and tales constructed by the Apollonian principle of order and form to protect humans against the apprehension of the Dionysian states of formlessness, chaos and gleeful destruction. Tragedy controls the primeval force of music by presenting us with beautiful illusory forms of gods, demons, men and women, through whom apprehension is bearable and possible. He wrote: “Every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and the Apollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, ubiquitous but unnoticed, presiding over the growth of the child’s mind and interpreting to the mature man his life and struggles.

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Bill o’ Goods

Coming due to a waning superpower near you. To the Doghouse for your elucidification:

Medicare–it provides less than half the medical expenses of its beneficiaries, the elderly and the disabled–is13% of the Federal budget. Total Medicare spending in 2009 was $484 billion. In 2009 the total interest on the National Debt attributable to military spending was $390 billion. That’s the interest we pay on all things military (including VA costs and military pensions) for having acted, since 1946, as though it were perpetually 1944.

Our ten Nimitz-class supercarriers represent a $450 billion collection of holes in the ocean in construction costs alone; they’re scheduled to be replaced by 2040 by an equal number of Gerald Ford-class hulks at twice the cost, assuming you believe 2005 estimates, which you shouldn’t. That’s construction costs. Not development, nor maintenance, nor upgrades, attendant fleet, staffing, planes, aviation fuel, or the cost someone will eventually bear to do something with the twin reactors when we don’t need ’em anymore. That’s our supercarrier Navy. No one else in the world has any. Their role is to intimidate tenth-rate military powers, since we haven’t figured out how to invade any on the ground.

Which is distinct from figuring out why we need to invade any, since that answer is either too amorphous to pin down, or too brutally self-reflective to ever see the light of newsprint.

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Films on Fridges

You, too, can become a creative-type person:

It is Britain’s coolest new pop-up cinema and the only one inspired by a load of rubbish. Films on Fridges is the brainchild of 25-year-old American Lindsey Scannapieco and it is inspired by “Fridge Mountain”, the 20ft high pile of discarded fridges that towered over the London district of Hackney until its removal in 2005. Films on Fridges is an outdoor venue where the screen is surrounded by fridges, the bar is made of fridge parts, and fridge doors are incorporated into the seating arrangements.

Scannapieco was researching east London while studying City Design at the LSE when she first heard about the dumped refrigerators. “Fridge Mountain seemed to be part of urban folklore,” says Scannapieco. “Something which spoke to east London’s industrial past at a time when the area was changing. I thought it would be fun to resurrect it and create something that was both educational and playful.”

Fridge mountain. Kids today. Though our version of this might be some ohio teenagers doing some freelance fracking on the weekends. American creativity – that will be an awesome CNN chryon: BP sues teenagers over illegal fracturing.

Dog sues man.

Cool kids update: Films on Fridges has a site. uh huh. whadya say to that, ohio teens?

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Purus Inceptos Euismod Sit

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Designing Compensations

So the Obama Administration, in a bold display of having other work to do, is set to announce new fuel efficiency minimums today, though it might be an out for car makers.

At issue is a “technology re-opener” that allows auto manufacturers to fight the standards after 2021 in the hopes that they can re-negotiate rules with a future administration that may be more lenient on the industry. The re-opener potentially gives auto companies an incentive not to develop technologies immediately so they can argue down the road that the standard can’t be met.

And researchers at Caltech are engaged in extreme, Onionesque crazy talk about increasing the power output of some new, vertical-axis wind turbines.

simply by optimizing the placement of vertical wind turbines on a given plot of land.

…

The experimental wind-farm houses two-dozen 1.2-meter-wide vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs). Vertical turbines that have rotors and look like eggbeaters sticking out of the ground. Each turbine is 10 meters tall.

Now is simply not the time to suggest these nugget-sized simplistic solutions to the overwhelmingly complex issues facing the world today. What we need are cautious yet controversial, half-baked propositions that allow leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, to pick an arbitrary side and battle to a standstill. Unrest at a loggerheads. No decision. A dead-end into which to channel our hostilities, to let our economic and ecological problems convulse into something much more magnificently horrific than we can now imagine. In a word, or two: more freedom. There’s just no reason to let these so called easy answers peek through and scare people. Bikes. Walking. Cooking your own food. Handholding. Making out…. these were of another time. Let’s calm down and argue about things that matter: like iPhone vs. Blackberry. Now there’s an argument that’s built to last, that means something. Where do you stand?