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On Perfidy

Glenn Greenwald has a nice meta re-cap of his latest encounter with established media re: L’Affair Assange. It’s an instructive reminder of just how inseparable are the ‘who’ that provides your news and the ‘what’ it is supposedly all about:

It’s not news that establishment journalists identify with, are merged into, serve as spokespeople for, the political class:  that’s what makes them establishment journalists.  But even knowing that, it’s just amazing, to me at least, how so many of these “debates” I’ve done involving one anti-WikiLeaks political figure and one ostensibly “neutral” journalist — on MSNBC with The Washington Post‘s Jonathan Capehart and former GOP Congresswoman Susan Molinari, on NPR with The New York Times‘ John Burns and former Clinton State Department official James Rubin, and last night on CNN with Yellin and Townsend — entail no daylight at all between the “journalists” and the political figures.  They don’t even bother any longer with the pretense that they’re distinct or play different assigned roles.

And there are identical notches in that belt for climate, environment, high finance, taxes, business generally… the list is its own scandal. Where does it start? This kind of rot is re-inforced from two directions, at least: the top of the food chain at the journalism-government crossover, and at the j-schools themselves. The kids learn how to network and are instructed by the commencement speakers who demonstrate not how to afflict but how to comfort, and thus move up the hierarchy into the anchor/editor’s chair. It’s all a celebration of career success, practically apart from what makes the career. The notion of muckraking doesn’t even come up; instead the news bleeds towards the most vulnerable, i.e., those least equipped to defend themselves, who can be dissected in public without push back or a loss of advertising revenue. Immigrants, the poor, criminals. I should qualify that: low-level criminals. Accordingly, no voices allowed that vary from the corporate line until the playing field is sufficiently skewed that you can be easily disregarded as a radical for advocating things like… high speed rail.

Oh, the horrors. But the Cossacks work for the Czar. Some of this is in exchange for the comfort we get from news that is based on things like the ‘war on Christmas’, black friday and shark attacks in summer. So it’s in part our fault for not rejecting the poolside, corporate, rolling green carpet viewpoint more stridently. The other part is a testament to how difficult it is to rock the boat, especially when things are going so swell.

So resolve and be resolute – without the self-condemnation of cynicism or conspiracy. There’s more room there to be skeptical than you think.

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International Thief Thief

Courtesy of a ne’er-do-well compatriot, I’ve recently gotten a turntable back up and running chez green. One of the newly re-found favorites never replaced on cd, along with Lush Life, is a modest collection of Fela Kuti records. Great story-teller and general tell-like-it-is-er, if you don’t know about him, do some checking around. This is a good one, with many, or some, of his wives singing backup, depending on who you choose to believe. But here he calls out AIG, WTO and even named the song after ITT. “Confusion. Corruption. Inflation.”

Well well.

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Means as Message

Digital-Billboards-Mockup

The Times returns to a past series on driving distractions to look at LED billboards:

Some cities and states are debating whether to prohibit or regulate this new form of advertising for fear that it can distract drivers and raise the rate of accidents.

A new study concludes that there are environmental reasons to avoid digital billboards as well. Digital billboards, which are made of LED lights, consume lots of energy and are made of components that will turn into e-waste once the billboard’s life has ended.

But wait, you ask, isn’t LED lighting quite energy-efficient? True, notes the report’s author, Gregory Young, a Philadelphia-based architectural designer and urban planner. But traditional billboards are lit by only two or three lamps, albeit inefficient ones, and only at night. By contrast, digital billboards have hundreds if not thousands of LEDs, which are illuminated day and night. And LEDs function poorly at high temperatures, so the signs need a cooling system.

This would seem to be the worst of both worlds so, of course: we all want one. Turn your interstate into a lame version of the Vegas strip. Really, it’s another brilliant move by the outdoor advertising industry, who you should assume has all your best interests at heart – they’re looking out for you, just like all the health care companies and financial planning institutions that pay their biggest fees. But even outside of the inherent dangers of looking up from your iPad burrito Four Loko steering wheel and general eco-lessness of these forms of advertising, I’m more concerned about the sort of dull feeling about our surroundings that actually emanate from them, much more strongly than any other intended message. Beaming lights in articulation of a come-in and/or otherwise recognizable logo design is our current version of anti-beauty. And as much as LED billboards seem like some sort of natural evolution of the kind of eye-poison to which we’ve all become so accustomed and accommodating, they’re not. They are their own form of dystopia. I.e., an actual sign of something.

Since some call this the season of beauty, everyone should just take some time and re-load on the most agreeable things you can find. It will help us not be so accepting of these kinds of invasions into our mental space, especially through the pollution of actual space, using actual pollution to do it. Three birds: meet my friend, stone.

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Too Things

1. This stuff is easy to miss: China learns at the knee(s) of the master… or do they?

Thanks to the Dandong plant and hundreds others like it, China is in the midst of unprecedented economic growth—and an unprecedented surge in the use of energy, primarily from burning coal. Coal is the fuel of China and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. As a result, China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with all the other noxious by-products of coal burning. At the same time, the Chinese government has committed to reducing its CO2 emissions per economic unit by at least 40 percent by 2020. Tasked with ensuring that the nation delivers on that goal is the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the government agency that essentially sets Chinese energy and industrial policy.

“In Manhattan, lights are lit 24 hours and China will never do that,” says NDRC vice chairman Zhang Guobao via a translator, although the lights of this border town abutting North Korea blaze well into the night, illuminating businesses that tout their names in both Chinese and Korean characters. “China can never learn from the United States in terms of lifestyle. Per capita energy consumption is five times that of China and suppose, one day, that we learn from the U.S.A.: Can you imagine what the world will be?”

And then this talk, by Leslie Hazleton on reading the Qur’an.

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Oldspapers

Critical piece by David Cay Johnston on why reporting is so bad, getting worse and going away, all at the same time.

This problem is not with the breakdown in the centuries-old economic model, a simple model that many journalists do not really understand. Connecting buyers and sellers who are in search of one another pays the bills. What draws them is a desire to find out that which is important but that they did not know. We call this information the news.

Far too much of what we produce today is already widely known. We fill so many pages with rehashed or known information that on many days these publications could properly be called oldspapers. It’s not like there isn’t important and revealing news all around us. There is. It’s just that we seem swept up in a herd mentality with too narrow a focus and too much eagerness to rely on what sources tell us rather than asking these same people to address important facts that lie in plain sight in the public record.

Lazy, incurious, often-times just plain dumb… know anybody like that? Relying on them for your world view?

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What does Green(e) Street mean?

I was just up in the city of New Amsterdam with a couple of ne’er-do-wells of mutual acquaintance. We were staying on a street that featured an interesting configuration of pavement designs.

2008_11_grandagain

That’s Grand Street. The arrows denote the bike lanes and the tourist buses that are now impaired from criss-crossing SoHo because of said bike lanes. Also offended: trucks of all kinds. It’s a one-way, with a line of parking separating the bike lanes from traffic – an excellent safety and alt transportation feature that snakes through SoHo, Chinatown and Little Italy and has upset all kinds of other users. Bloomberg wanted 1,800 miles of bike lanes in the city and this is what that kind of conflict thinking looks like. Definitely still a work in progress.

Sharing the road is difficult, but not impossible, especially if the number of combustion-engine vehicles remains the same. Taking some number of C-E vehicles off the road: also very difficult.

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Wind WIN

The Philadelphia Eagles are out to a big lead in renewable energy for their stadium, Lincoln Financial Field, below.

Stadium-Aerial-2-Revised-11-15

Lincoln Financial Field will convert to self-generated renewable energy w/ the help of Solar Blue! Solar Blue will equip Lincoln Financial Field with onsite wind, solar power and dual-fuel generated electricity.

Vertical axis wind turbines, solar panels, biofuel-fired cogeneration power plant… all bold in the original, if you know what I mean. It’s high-visibility because people watch this stuff and so could be very impact-y and go far beyond the direct generation of power – which is huge on its own. Signals, people.

Maybe with the new moonroof in the Minneapolis dome roof and the clamoring for a new, publicly-financed stadium there, someone in the process will get a clue and connect some possibilities to some needs, try to make these enormous, new projects into something more than a way to showcase the world largest flatscreen TV.

Go Iggles.

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The Nature of Envy

There’s a non-sensical story in here somewhere about harnessing the friction between the world’s two largest emitters of GhG’s to generate electricity, but I either can’t find it or look past it too easily.

He noted that China has recently leapfrogged over the United States to become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. “They know the world’s radar is on them,” Mr. Ramesh said. “If transparency becomes the stumbling block, China doesn’t want to be blamed. If China is the only party holding out, they won’t collapse the negotiations.”

It’s Cancún, you see, anything can happen – unless december weekends are decidedly un-spring break-like. Actually, I don’t mean to be so flip. This is the United Nations – the group to which falls the tasks labeled ‘doing something’ when nobody wants to do anything. Nobody wanting anything done actually is another case entirely and has a conference of its own.

But another word, because something is escaping us here with all these willing and smart people gathered in one place, on envy, especially as the wrench ex machina of egalitarianism.

A different way in which envy might be thought to motivate broadly egalitarian thought is by appeal to the idea of envy-free allocations. A distribution of goods is said to be “envy-free” when no one prefers anyone else’s bundle of resources to her own.[] The suggestion here is not that envy is the psychological motivation for the concern with equality, but rather that, where a distribution in fact produces envy, this is grounds to doubt the fairness of the distribution. But ‘envy’ in these contexts is a technical term for any situation in which someone prefers another’s bundles of goods, and does not refer to the emotional syndrome with which this entry is concerned.[]

This is the chief virtue of resistance to economic changes and any greater changes in the way we power, light, ship and travel. The haves (look around you) are afraid that at the end of this dull day, we will all be reduced to just having the same things. When, really, taste, rather any kind of envy-free allocation, would never allow for such a thing – as this failure of imagination gainfully proves. So this brand of resisters really have nothing to worry about. Just not the way they usually expect to be beyond worry. Fear of the bottom, therefore, drives the refusal to alter any actions at the top. Let this be addressed.

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Man Power

More like this, please, via Balloon Juice. Six months of networks ads like this and an attitude develops that begins to ruin the old economy and home birth the new one – no meds and maybe a midwife, but a bouncy healthy girl suckling at Mom’s nipple when it’s all said and done.

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Oh La Vache! and other Mercurial Inunctions

Dubuffet_The_Cow_with_a_Subtile_Nose

And if you should require more than a thousand, maybe check out The Cosmological Eye by H. Miller.

I should say that ever since the dawn of history–all through
the great civilizations, that is to say–we have been living like lice.
Once every thousand years or so a man arises who is not a louse–
and then there is even more hell to pay. When a MAN appears
he seems to get a stranglehold on the world which it takes cen-
turies to break. The sane people are cunning enough to find these
men “psychopathic.” These sane ones seem to be more interested
in the technique of the stranglehold than in applying it. That’s a
curious phenomenon, one that puzzles me, to be frank. It’s like
learning the art of wrestling in order to have the pleasure of letting
someone pin you to the mat.

What do I mean to infer? Just this–that art, the art of living,
involves the act of creation. The work of art is nothing. It is only
the tangible, visible evidence of a way of life, which, if it is not
crazy is certainly different from the accepted way of life. The dif-
ference lies in the act, in the assertion of a will, and individuality.
For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself
with it, is suicidal. An artist should be able not only to spit on his
predecessor’s art, or on all works of art, but on his own too. He
should be able to be an artist all the time, and finally not be an
artist at all, but a piece of art.