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The Modern Transport System

In China.

High-speed trains linking Beijing and Shanghai made their passenger debut Thursday on a $33 billion track China hopes will help ease its overloaded transport system.

…

The fast link, which has been hit by safety concerns and graft, is opening a year ahead of schedule and will be able to carry 80 million passengers a year — double the current capacity on the 1,318-kilometre (820-mile) route.

So we get safety and graft concerns, too, but without the fancy new rail lines to show for it. And sure, destructive for the airline industry, okay, what else? Have you flown recently? The airlines are about as cavalier about comfort, cost and efficiency as is sub-humanly possible. The flight distance between Atlanta and Boston is about 950 miles, and we’re at least twenty years away from China building a high-speed rail route linking the two cities. Probably more.

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Friends, Romans

For some Friday reading on Sunday, and in honor of the independence of this great nation, I give you Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont on the occasion of our demise:

At a time when the wealthiest people and the largest corporations in our country are doing phenomenally well and in many cases have never had it so good, while the middle class is disappearing and poverty is increasing, it is absolutely imperative that any deficit-reduction package that passes this Congress not include the horrendous cuts, the cruel cuts in programs that working people desperately need that are utilized every day by the elderly, by the sick, by our children, and by the lowest income people in our country, that the Republicans in Congress, dominated by their extreme rightwing, are demanding.

America is not about giving tax breaks to billionaires and attacking the most vulnerable people in our country. We must not allow that to happen.

In my view, the President of the United States needs to stand with the vast majority of the American people and say no to the Republican leadership and make it clear that enough is enough. No, we will not balance the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable people in this country–on our children, on our seniors and the sick. No, we will not do that. Working families in this country have already sacrificed enough in terms of lost jobs, lost wages, lost homes, lost pensions. The working families of this country are hurting right now. Enough is enough.

Read the whole 90-minute speech at the link, which he gave unyieldingly in the well the other day. Like it, friend it, do whatever it is you do to pass these things around.

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Power to Use Less

This is, while amazing, perfectly believable.

Those little boxes that usher cable signals and digital recording capacity into televisions have become the single largest electricity drain in many American homes, with some typical home entertainment configurations eating more power than a new refrigerator and even some central air-conditioning systems.

…

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

So… we are those fat people in Wall*E, hovering in lazy boys with the power always on. And this, near the end, perfectly incapsulates that way(s) we deflect any responsibility for our actions:

Mr. Wilson recalled that when he was on the California Energy Commission, he asked box makers why the hard drives were on all the time, using so much power. The answer: “Nobody asked us to use less.”

Consider yourselves asked. Please.

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Away

WH_OB

Off (via several modes of elitist mass transit) to an undisclosed, mostly non-blogging location.

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Expense of the Environment

It’s an interesting concept, especially as we’ve all but stopped letting the costs of war preclude us from war-making, but how much should protecting the environment cost us? In money and competitiveness, the issue is contentious, rife with conflicts, false promises and disinformation. But, let no one tell you that Republican officeholders at every level stand for anything but rolling back regulations and agencies charged with protecting the environment. While there was hardly ever any doubt about this, now there is not even a pose.

The budget approved by the legislature, led by Republicans for the first time in a century, eliminates the program as part of roughly $23 million in environmental program cuts that would chop more than 150 positions. All told, the department’s budget would be cut by 12 percent, more than double the cuts proposed by Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat.

The legislative budget also would shift some operations to the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which is led by a Republican commissioner, a move some fear would change the focus from environmental protection to business enhancement.

That’s in North Carolina, but it is everywhere the same. Democrats get elected promising to enact new regulations and fund alternatives; Republicans get elected promising to rein in regulations and lavish spending on boondoggles. Eye; beholder. I especially like this:

“I don’t want to destroy anything,” said state Sen. Don East, a Surry County Republican and an environmental budget writer. “I just don’t think these very stringent environmental rules that we are living under are going to do what the environmentalists say they do.”

How could they? I believe he doesn’t want to do any harm to anything, including taking any power away from anybody to release anything anywhere. You know, the little guy. Sorry, dude. That’s not a choice anymore. Now you have to actually make choices. Oh: you are.




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Station Break

For this completely outrageous abuse of power.

WASHINGTON — A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

Here’s Cole’s post on the development from Thursday. It doesn’t matter if you think you can read this and say, “Sure the government was/is doing that – big deal.” No, sorry. Yawning is not enough. This is plainly wrong. What if you heard tomorrow that the US government had been purposely dumping anti-depressants in our water supply since the 1990’s. Would you feign some kind of detachment so as to take it all in stride? Why? What gets you upset? What’s that reserved for? What would it take?

This is an egregious breech of basic honest government to allow itself and the public to be informed. Even if conducted by our last worst president, it was still in our name, still representative of us and what we say we will allow. This is a perfect example of an occasion where Holder could choose to look into a specific example of an abuse of power by the Bush Administration. Spying on an American citizen is a no-go. Sorry. It’s already been rendered as such almost forty years ago (and spelled out as such 200 years ago). And unless you firmly believe (i.e., support) this is just no big deal, Bush’s action make you a dissident. Congratulations.

If you’ve been reading here for any length of time, you’re familiar with Cole. He reads Arabic, and so reads the ex-pat papers out of London. He is an expert on the region and has been indispensable for analysis of the goings-on the Middle East since at least 2003. If the CIA and White House aren’t reading his blog daily, then and now, and in any way succumbed to his marginalization as a source of news and analysis, they’re idiots. Plain and simple.

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Open your art books to page…

A reminder that there are all shades of green, some of them not Eco at all. Via, this little meditation on, faced with school budget cutbacks that always, ALWAYS, get aimed at the art curriculum first, how we should teach art instead of history.

This general scenario matches up with other stories I’ve seen. But why should art be on the chopping block before history class? I believe we romanticize history, making it seem practically and ideally more important than it is. People defend history in the gauzy language of citizenship, with appeals that rarely rise above aphorism. “Those who don’t history are bound to repeat it”. This doesn’t hold up in a practical sense though. There’s a reason the phrase isn’t “those who have history as a significant part of their high school curriculum are bound to repeat it”. Being taught history doesn’t make you better voters unless you remember that history. I’m not going to go down the litany of things that huge percentage of Americans incorrectly believe about history, instead I’ll just give one prominent example. How many hundreds of millions of dollars to we spend each year teaching kids about the Civil War, and still 42% of people don’t know we fought it over slavery?

Sign me up. I would even say (but never write) that we would better off teaching (more) people about art. An example? a survey about the work of JL David will render the history of French Revolution unforgettable. And once you have The Death of Marat or The Tennis Court Oath in your head, along with the stories behind them, you’re only going to want to find out more. Moving through history on the basis of art movements is a more durable sort of engagement. Why the salons of the 1870’s happened or Goya’s dark paintings just doesn’t go away. That knowledge moves and grows into something else. Something we need.

And this is to say nothing of the benefits of people learning printmaking or drawing. It would be like mass producing the keys to critical thinking and problem solving. Then we can finally get back to that Shangra-La where no one locks their doors.

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Gooooaaaaaalllll!

brazil-wind-turbines

A new national 10-year plan from Brazil shows that the country will triple its use of renewable energy by 2020 and that a lot of that energy will be wind energy.

Going from 9 GW of wind, biomass and small hydropower in 2010, the country intends to hit 27 GW by 2020. It wants to have 16% of its electricity supply coming from renewables in 10 years.

On wind energy, the country hit the 1 GW milestone in May but plans to get to 12 GW by 2020. Last year’s 10-year plan only had the country getting 6 GW from wind by 2019, so you can see that the country is really stepping up its wind energy goals.

Source: Clean Technica (http://s.tt/12CMD)

By comparison, renewables met 8% of total energy demand in the U.S. during 2009 and 10% of total electricity generation. We don’t expect to hit the 17% mark until 2035. Which is not a goal, but more like a foul.
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Electronic Collectivism

I haven’t finished this piece yet by Sven Birkerts in the LA Review of Books, The Room and the Elephant, but it’s a situation you can relate to. via A&LDaily.

Every so often something will break through the stimulus shield I hold up whenever I go online, which I do far too often these days, we all do, and for various reasons, one being, I’m sure, that the existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we feel only the medium can allay — even though it cannot, never has. But it is an attribute of the Internet to activate in me, and maybe in all its users, a persistent sense of deferred expectancy, as if that thing that I might be looking for, that I couldn’t name but would know if I saw, were at every moment a finger tap away. That is the root of the addiction right there — and it is an addiction, sure, if only a lower-case one. To bear all this, therefore, to proof myself against the unstanchable flow of unnecessary information and peripheral sensation, I make use of this shield, which is really just an attention-averting reflex, a way of filtering almost everything away, leaving just the barest bones of whatever I happen to be looking at, and these only in case some tell-tale name or expression requires me to peer a bit more closely.

I practice this defensive, exclusionary scanning not only with the incidental flotsam I encounter — the inescapable digests of happenings in the world, celebrity divorces, killer storms, and so on — but also, more and more, with texts about subjects that ostensibly concern me. A recent case in point — I have it handy now because I finally printed it out — is an article I found online at The Awl called “Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert” by Maria Bustillos (posted on May 17, 2011). It came to me via several clicks at one of the so-called “aggregate” sites I sometimes visit to keep myself “informed.” I scan a great many articles in the course of my daily tours, but I am not avid. More often I scroll my eyes down the screen with a preemptive weariness — which is an angry and defensive posture, I agree — as if nothing truly worthy could ever be found online (I know this is not true), as if I will have conceded something to the opposition if I were to fully engage the Internet and profit from the engagement.