...and a happy new year to Michael Crichton (and all his stupid fans)
EnergyBulletin.net :: Methane Burps: Ticking Time Bomb: "There are enormous quantities of naturally occurring greenhouse gasses trapped in ice-like structures in the cold northern muds and at the bottom of the seas. These ices, called clathrates, contain 3,000 times as much methane as is in the atmosphere. Methane is more than 20 times as strong a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide.
Now here's the scary part. A temperature increase of merely a few degrees would cause these gases to volatilize and 'burp' into the atmosphere, which would further raise temperatures, which would release yet more methane, heating the Earth and seas further, and so on. There's 400 gigatons of methane locked in the frozen arctic tundra - enough to start this chain reaction - and the kind of warming the Arctic Council predicts is sufficient to melt the clathrates and release these greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Once triggered, this cycle could result in runaway global warming the likes of which even the most pessimistic doomsayers aren't talking about.
An apocalyptic fantasy concocted by hysterical environmentalists? Unfortunately, no. Strong geologic evidence suggests something similar has happened at least twice before.
The most recent of these catastrophes occurred about 55 million years ago in what geologists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), when methane burps caused rapid warming and massive die-offs, disrupting the climate for more than 100,000 years. "
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
Merry Christmas, Rich People!
Holiday Haul Goes to High-End Retailers (washingtonpost.com)
Pay is rising more than twice as fast for the top fifth of wage earners as it is for all others, and the pace of gains at the high end is quickening, according to economists' analyses of government income data through September.
Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income from all sources and earning $127,000 or more as of 2003, accounts for more than 40 percent of all consumer spending, according to Labor Department figures.
Holiday Haul Goes to High-End Retailers (washingtonpost.com)
Pay is rising more than twice as fast for the top fifth of wage earners as it is for all others, and the pace of gains at the high end is quickening, according to economists' analyses of government income data through September.
Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income from all sources and earning $127,000 or more as of 2003, accounts for more than 40 percent of all consumer spending, according to Labor Department figures.
Thursday, December 09, 2004
Fox News Partners With Clear Channel
Great now the biggest radio network in the country is going to get its news from the most ideologically right-wing news service in the country. Certainly nothing will come of this.
In other media news, most of the complaints (99.8%) about CBS indencency that Michael Powell cited as evidence of the public outrage over seeing a nipple, came from one activist group. I am not sure how unique this is, but it certainly points to there being a less substantial public outcry in the broad sense than was previously indicated.
Great now the biggest radio network in the country is going to get its news from the most ideologically right-wing news service in the country. Certainly nothing will come of this.
In other media news, most of the complaints (99.8%) about CBS indencency that Michael Powell cited as evidence of the public outrage over seeing a nipple, came from one activist group. I am not sure how unique this is, but it certainly points to there being a less substantial public outcry in the broad sense than was previously indicated.
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas
Lessig has a difficult task. He has to present an argument that most market fundamentalists will find sacreligous, but strongly position himself as pro-market. I am not sure how much of his self-confessed "virulently-pro market" attitude is effected for the sake of this particular audience, or if he is being strategic to keep them from dumping him into the "end of history" pile that lay underneath their pulpits.
Either way, intentionally or not, he is basically asking for us to allow a sliver of socialism to persist--one in which there is a certain anarchy (qua freedom) allowed to continue in the realm of the internet and other new technological innovations. He has compelling arguments for why this is necessary and avoids the kind of history that people like Mattelart or McChesney have written where they recognize the way that every technology of communication--regardless of how communally developed it was--eventually became colonized, enclosed by one economic and political interest group at the expense of others. But what he does focus on is the history of the communal development of the internet, foretelling the coming enclosure of these commons and its subsequent dessication and commodification. He is basicially sounding a warning bell.
Overlooks other types of value creation--that all value is, for the most part a social creation. much of history of capitalism has placed the holder of values at the top of the totem pole, overlooks risks taken by others in the production process
More here on the way that value is changing--as the production has become globalized and the only power north holds is over the intellectual property, this becomes the central stake in the struggle--much harder to keep enclosed.
He is right that this will be a central stake in the struggle of the next century and he is basically asking the market fundamentalists to resist making it so while at the same time subtly encouraging the rest of us to resist this commodification (maybe, though I'm not done. I assume he will have some sort of call to action.)
Lessig has a difficult task. He has to present an argument that most market fundamentalists will find sacreligous, but strongly position himself as pro-market. I am not sure how much of his self-confessed "virulently-pro market" attitude is effected for the sake of this particular audience, or if he is being strategic to keep them from dumping him into the "end of history" pile that lay underneath their pulpits.
Either way, intentionally or not, he is basically asking for us to allow a sliver of socialism to persist--one in which there is a certain anarchy (qua freedom) allowed to continue in the realm of the internet and other new technological innovations. He has compelling arguments for why this is necessary and avoids the kind of history that people like Mattelart or McChesney have written where they recognize the way that every technology of communication--regardless of how communally developed it was--eventually became colonized, enclosed by one economic and political interest group at the expense of others. But what he does focus on is the history of the communal development of the internet, foretelling the coming enclosure of these commons and its subsequent dessication and commodification. He is basicially sounding a warning bell.
Overlooks other types of value creation--that all value is, for the most part a social creation. much of history of capitalism has placed the holder of values at the top of the totem pole, overlooks risks taken by others in the production process
More here on the way that value is changing--as the production has become globalized and the only power north holds is over the intellectual property, this becomes the central stake in the struggle--much harder to keep enclosed.
He is right that this will be a central stake in the struggle of the next century and he is basically asking the market fundamentalists to resist making it so while at the same time subtly encouraging the rest of us to resist this commodification (maybe, though I'm not done. I assume he will have some sort of call to action.)
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
http://www.unit731media.com/
http://www.terroristmedia.com/nukem/index.php
Two sites I have happened upon to this evening. I must say that I am more distubed by these images on these sites than I have been in a long while. Stayed up way too late looking at them, feeling such great sadness and fear. The beheading videos are particularly troubling and make me wonder just how anything will ever get any better. Once a cause becomes so ingrained in someone that they are willing to do this to someone else it is doubtful that any amount of empirical change will lead them to change their mind. I still don't think that war is the answer. I don't think this is because I have some pacifist tendency ingrained in me. it just seems like a stupid strategy, on par with targeted beheadings in its potential to incite rage. They both stem from the same desire to make power visible.
On the other hand, seeing something like this, a beheading, that is done in someone's basement instead of in the halls of state, with the legitimacy of state power around it, it is horifying. It is like something that could happen a few feet away. The ceremony that it performed beforehand means nothing to me; but it is the attempt to give it this kind of legitimacy that only state ceremony can. But it isn't a state ceremony: herein lies my newly reborn ambivalence, which sits alongside what might be a basically pragmatic pacifism.
If a state were to do this, if an American citizen were brazenly executed on television with the sanction of a state, I would feel little compunction to say that the United States should not retaliate with some sort of force, probably militarily. This, of course, is not a natural response--either the one that the US would take or my internal response to their response--but it is one for which the history of my culture has prepared me. That innocent civilians would probably be killed in this retaliation would be ethically and morally repugnant, but in some strange way justified because they can be named as political subjects of the offending regime. Here, again, I am sort of thinking through the dominant logic which I had lived through for most of my life: it's a hard habit to break. Furthermore in this equation, it obviously doesn't matter if the people who are assumed to be legitimate extensions of the state had any hand in placing that state in control, i.e. it doesn't matter if it is a democracy, which, in this scenario, it most likely would not be. State officials worried about re-election don't often provoke wars by publically assassinating the citizens of other countries (though I guess we have special privileges).
When Individuals do this, however, even if they are theoretically part of a movement, I cannot reason this. Not only is there no sense in going to war with a state, but I cannot fathom what the terms of the discussion should be for justice. To talk about punishment seems paltry--what kind of punishment is suitable? Reform is laughable. Revenge? The easiest step to take, right there with the death penalty. But that just seems to bloody more hands. No, I take that back, the easiest thing to do is to simply ignore it, to make those bad men disappear and head off to my half warm bed, where my wife and dog await me. If I was any more able to talk about this at this point, I would want to explore some of the ways that Foucault might discuss this--or not discuss this. I sound totally stupid here, but I am stymied by what this does to my worldview--not because it makes me suddenly think that GWB is the best thing since sliced bread but that I can't understand why the people I read who claim to care about people wouldn't care about these people as well. My knee jerk 2 am answer is that it's just way too hard. I'm going to go with that for now...
http://www.terroristmedia.com/nukem/index.php
Two sites I have happened upon to this evening. I must say that I am more distubed by these images on these sites than I have been in a long while. Stayed up way too late looking at them, feeling such great sadness and fear. The beheading videos are particularly troubling and make me wonder just how anything will ever get any better. Once a cause becomes so ingrained in someone that they are willing to do this to someone else it is doubtful that any amount of empirical change will lead them to change their mind. I still don't think that war is the answer. I don't think this is because I have some pacifist tendency ingrained in me. it just seems like a stupid strategy, on par with targeted beheadings in its potential to incite rage. They both stem from the same desire to make power visible.
On the other hand, seeing something like this, a beheading, that is done in someone's basement instead of in the halls of state, with the legitimacy of state power around it, it is horifying. It is like something that could happen a few feet away. The ceremony that it performed beforehand means nothing to me; but it is the attempt to give it this kind of legitimacy that only state ceremony can. But it isn't a state ceremony: herein lies my newly reborn ambivalence, which sits alongside what might be a basically pragmatic pacifism.
If a state were to do this, if an American citizen were brazenly executed on television with the sanction of a state, I would feel little compunction to say that the United States should not retaliate with some sort of force, probably militarily. This, of course, is not a natural response--either the one that the US would take or my internal response to their response--but it is one for which the history of my culture has prepared me. That innocent civilians would probably be killed in this retaliation would be ethically and morally repugnant, but in some strange way justified because they can be named as political subjects of the offending regime. Here, again, I am sort of thinking through the dominant logic which I had lived through for most of my life: it's a hard habit to break. Furthermore in this equation, it obviously doesn't matter if the people who are assumed to be legitimate extensions of the state had any hand in placing that state in control, i.e. it doesn't matter if it is a democracy, which, in this scenario, it most likely would not be. State officials worried about re-election don't often provoke wars by publically assassinating the citizens of other countries (though I guess we have special privileges).
When Individuals do this, however, even if they are theoretically part of a movement, I cannot reason this. Not only is there no sense in going to war with a state, but I cannot fathom what the terms of the discussion should be for justice. To talk about punishment seems paltry--what kind of punishment is suitable? Reform is laughable. Revenge? The easiest step to take, right there with the death penalty. But that just seems to bloody more hands. No, I take that back, the easiest thing to do is to simply ignore it, to make those bad men disappear and head off to my half warm bed, where my wife and dog await me. If I was any more able to talk about this at this point, I would want to explore some of the ways that Foucault might discuss this--or not discuss this. I sound totally stupid here, but I am stymied by what this does to my worldview--not because it makes me suddenly think that GWB is the best thing since sliced bread but that I can't understand why the people I read who claim to care about people wouldn't care about these people as well. My knee jerk 2 am answer is that it's just way too hard. I'm going to go with that for now...
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