John Thackara
Notes headed with the chapter they come from.
On closer inspection however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car manufacturers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand—but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. “Out of control” is an ideology, not a fact. 5
Apart from its impact on the wider economy, information technology is heavy in itself. It’s a heavy user of matter in all the hardware needed to run it. One of the hidden costs of the misnamed silicon age is the material and energy flows involved in the manufacture and use of microchips. It takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip with 32 megabytes of random-access memory—a total 630 times the mass of the final product. The “fab” of a basic memory chip, and running it for the typical life span of a computer, eats up eight hundred times the chip’s weight in fossil fuel. Thousands of potentially toxic chemicals are used in the manufacturing process. 10
One of the most startling pieces of information brought to light in Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins’s Natural Capitalism is that the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight on your lap. Fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer. To compound matters: As well as being resource-greedy to make, information technology devices also have notoriously short lives. The average compact disc is used precisely once in its life, and every gram of material that goes into the production and consumption of a computer ends up rather quickly as an emission or as solid waste. 11
The pièce de résistance in the extraordinary Natural Capitalism is that the amount of matter and energy wasted, or caused to be wasted, by the average North American consumer is roughly one million pounds a year: a “million pound backpack.” 12
ELIMA, the Environmental Life Cycle information Management and Acquisition project. 13
A lot of potentially weight-reducing research goes unreported. Environmental design information tends to be scattered and fragmented, and many eco-design tools and data that could help us remain hidden from view and underused. Kathalys, a research group in Holland, turns ecological footprints into design action points by measuting pressure on the environment in terms of everyday activities in the home—such as taking a shower. Taking just one shower in a top-of-the-range cubicle, Kathalys has discovered, consumes as much as thirty-five kilojoule-pounds in energy and two hundred litres of water. Kathalys is testing a mist shower that, combined with water and heat recycling, reduces those numbers tendolf, to five megajoule-pounds of heat and twenty litres of water. 15
Buckminster Fuller I think designed a super–bathroom, of which a mist shower played it’s part. I’ve wanted one ever since. It just sounds awesome, and how hard can it be? Why aren’t they sold at Home Depot?
TNS (The Natural Step), one of many “frameworks introduced to give us a better view of the big picture.”
- Minimize the waste of matter and energy.
- Reduce the movement and distribution of goods.
- Use more people and less matter. 16
…five types of capital enable us to deliver goods and services we need to sustain and improve the quality of our lives: natural, human, social, manufactured, and financial capital. 17
It’s the accumulation of such tiny acts that weighs heavily on the planet. A relationship, or flow, or accumulation, or change, is by its nature invisible. An important new task of design is to make these behaviors and changes within systems intelligible. We need new ways to understand the morphology of systems—their dynamics, their “intelligence”: how they work, what stimulates them, how and why they change. 22
We’ve embarked on an operation compared by Ezio Manzini to “changing the engines of an aircraft while in flight.” “It may appear a difficult task,” understates Manzini, “but consider this: during two centuries of innovation, until now, we have reduced the role of labour in production by even larger proportaions. We have done it before.” 23
The Hanover Principles, prepared by William McDonough’s architecture firm. 25
Shaking off out culture’s mechanical conception of the world, the idea of controllability, and our all-round anthropocentrism will be especially difficult. Writes Theodore Roszak: “Ecology, as the study of interconnectedness, has a psychological dimension—the transition from egocentrism, to ecocentrism. Copernicus took us out of the center of the solar system; we now need to take ourselves out of the center of the biosphere.” 26
Mentions Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for a New Millennium, which looks interesting but I can’t find a copy or much of anything but passing references. 26
The acceleration of the speed of human population growth means that in a single human lifetime, the Earth may lost half of its living species, species that it took tens of millions of years for evolution to create through the process of speciation. 32
the age of acceleration
The Greeks, Levine explains had two words for time: chronos and kairos. Chronos means absolute time: linear, chronological, and quantifiable. Kairos, however, means qualitative time—the time of opportunity, chance, and mischance. If you go to bed because the clock says 10:30, you are adhering to a chronological time sustem. if you go to sleep beacuse you’re tired, you are following kairological or event time. 33
Thoreau: “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” 33
The Kabyle people in Algeria, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu discovered, despise any semblance of haste in their social affairs and refer to the clock as “the devil’s mill.” 35
Beethoven: “the usage of measured tempo made no sense in music.” 49
Throughout the world […] 244 million containers are moving around, or standing in yards, or waiting to be delivered, at any one time. If all these containers were placed end to end, the line would stretch to the moon and back eight times. Their contents account for about 90 percent of all the world’s traded cargo by value. In other words, 85 percent of all the goods and materials in the world are not in factories or shops, but moving, or waiting to move—on the road, in the air, or on the sea. 55
“There is far too little information in the so-called information age”, “we feel compelled to reduce all human knowledge and experience to symbolic form”, “Digitization speeds the flow of data, but impoverishes our lived experience.” 63
“[The human brain] comprises the equivalent of one hundred billion squids linked together. Overall the human brain is the most complicated thin in the known universe—known, that is, to man, to itself.” —Edward O. Wilson.
“Nature doesn’t commute to work.” 72
A sustainable city, Illich foresaw, has to be a working city, a city of encounter and interaction—not a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be postspectacular. 76
“Tourism—human circulation considered as consumption—is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.” Guy Debord wrote that more than forty years ago, in The Society of the Spectacle. […] Cultural attractions are like genetically modified food: bland, tasteless, and a threat to the ecosystem. 77
A city full of people can now be seen as a live database, full of knowledge, time, and attention—incarnated by human beings—that any of us might use. Louis Kahn talked about the city as a “place of availabilities”; with wireless networks and search technologies, the potential becomes actual. 86
Our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world. Henry Plummer, 103
Place is not given, it is made. Malcolm McCullough, 111
The mortality rate of men with cardiovascular disease is inversely related to the level of social connectedness. 114
“When people no longer have the need or desire to resolve their problems within the network of their own relationships, medicine becomes the alibi of a pathogenic society.” Illich concluded that we have thrust the bad things of life—old age, death, pain, and handicap—onto doctors so that families and society will not have to face them. 117
Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe—for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom—or “content,” if you must—are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent. 135
We might reject the narrow focus of much corporate education, but it’s partly our own fault as a society. We have filled the world with such unstable technology and clunky systems; these need to be looked after by people with limited horizons who do what they are told and don’t ask too many questions. 137
Over-regimented teachers are forced to cram too much predetermined content into students who spend so much time learning that they have no time to think. It’s a downward spiral. The more important learning becomes, the more demands we put on teachers and students within rigidly organized institutions. 143
Design is to make information digestible, not to keep it out. 162
The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 171
Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. Ivan Illich, 180
How much do we really know about the trash heaps, slums, and wars depicted by today’s imaging technologies? THese technologies are supposed to give us a clearer image—but by sanitizing the subject, they prevent us from knowing reality itself. 183
We would not be here had not our ancestors rotted. All organisms are designed with the intention of being recycled. Learning from nature, this means we have to be careful about bond energies in materials and see that they can be broken down easily. Julian Vincent, 191
Three thousand lines of code in an electric toothbrush? 195
The world is already filled with hundreds of microprocessors for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Think of all those ATMs, ticket-cending machines, traffic lights, billboards, cellular phones, pagers, and cash registers. A new car from General Motors, contains $675 worth of steel and $2,500 worth of electronics. 198
China is issuing all its citizens above the age of sixteen a smart card id? 201
Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we are frighteningly inert. Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto), 201
“partial solutions, continually produced” 214
“We are all designers now” 226
There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness. In a civilization which requires most lives to be passed amid inordinate dissonance, pressure and intrusion, the chance of retiring now and then to the quietude and privacy of sylvan haunts becomes for some people a psychic necessity. The preservation of a few samples of undeveloped territory is one of the most clamant issues before us today. Just a few more years of hesitation and the only trace of that wilderness which has exerted such a fundamental influence in molding American character will lie in the musty pages of pioneer books… To avoid this catastrophe demands immediate action.
Attack on the front lawn. A not–all–that–interesting book, but on an interesting trend. My family’s house is on a double lot, roughly 80 feet wide. With front and back yards there’s very likely enough area that we could grow half of the food we eat in the summer. Being in minnesota would limit our choices a bit, but we could get over it and it’s not like there isn’t a grocer 5 minutes away by bike. But we have a reasonable green lawn instead. We have a rotary clipper—human-powered—and so don’t spew carbon into the air mowing it (1 hour of mowing your lawn is the equivalent of a 150km car trip), nor do we fertilize it with chemicals. But when you step back and think about it, the industry behing lawn care is indeed an insidious one.
We do have a decent garden, though most of it’s for show. I started an herb garden in the side yard years ago, which I quickly neglected, but it’s still going. No vegetables though. I just don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to gardening, and I don’t want to mess up my mom’s domain. When I get a place of my own I plan on starting a garden, but then maybe that’s just my deferral instinct talking. Who knows.
Excellent set of essays, coming from agrarian and writer Wendell Berry. He espouses his philosophy and does a good job of demeaning everything about modern–day american politics and society, but in a good way. I took so many notes I don’t want to write any of them down, plus it’s summer. Instead I’ll mark this here down to re–read in the not distant future.
Naomi Klein
Really a harrowing book from Naomi Klein. Follows the ideas of torture as they evolved scientifically, and melded with the economic theories of Milton Friedman to inspire a new way to run a country: that of corporatism. The first place these ideas took hold was in South America, when the CIA funded multiple coups d‘état and established military juntas supplied with Friedmanite economists (The and los Chicago Boys). This system was for some odd reason lauded by the West, and the systematic torture used to pacify those living in these countries was somehow seen as separate from the economic policies, when the economics were really the cause of the dissent that caused unheeded violence.
The system spread to all over the world, until it was ensconced in the Western canon of developing all Third World countries, as the IMF and World Bank. Systems were put in place whereby any country needing emergency loans from the IMF could only get the money they needed to forestall complete and disastrous economic collapse by parcelling up all different aspects of their nation (water, electricity, industry) and selling it off to multinational corporations. Which led to the same things that happened in Latin America in the 70s.
Now, under George W. Bush, this radical doctrine of privatization has taken hold on the US government. The war in Iraq has been fought by mercenaries and contractors just as much as by troops. FEMA doesn’t actually have any responsibility for dealing with disaster, it’s just an organization to arrange contractors around whatever happens to be the disaster du jour.
This book really damns the Western economic systems that have taken power over the past 50 years. The financial system, multinational corporations, governments, Aid organizations (even NGOs) have all had their part to play in the dismantling of countless struggling nations, only to benefit a clique of super–rich governmental and corporate tycoons. An awfully depressing read, but thankfully it looks like things might be getting better: the US seems on the verge of economic collapse, developing nations almost universally now scorn the establishments of the IMF and World Bank. They’re looking back to where they were before this plague of shock doctrine and disaster capitalism overtook them: developmentalism as opposed to “barbarian capitalism.” Good luck to them, here are my notes.
This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story—that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective bodhy politic as well as on countless individual bodies. 18
Ewan Cameron ran a research program funded by the CIA at a canadian university in which he pioneered the idea of shock therapy—that by dramatically altering someone’s environment and submitting them to excessive shock of various forms, they could be brought to a state of mental infancy, from whence they could then be rebuilt into functioning citizens.
Like pro–war hawks who call for the bombing of countries “back to the stone age,” Cameron saw shock therapy as a means to blast his patients back into their infancy, to regress them completely. 32
The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative1, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci–fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university—and an effective one at that. 38
1 When the program came to light in a class–action lawsuit by patients of Cameron against the CIA, the media sensationalized the fact that LSD was administered. They forgot to mention the rest of Cameron’s program.
Jose Padilla:
Arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, he was accused of intending to build a “dirty bomb.” Instead of being charged and taken through the court system, Padilla was classified as an enemy combatant, which stripped him of all tights. Taken to a U.S. Navy prison in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla says he was infected with a drug that he believes was either LSD or PCP and subjected to intense sensory deprivation: he was kept in a tiny cell with the windows blacked out and forbidden to have a clock or a calendar. Whenever he left the cell he was shackled, his eyes were covered with blackout goggles and sound was blocked with heavy headphones. Padilla was kept under these conditions for 1,307 days and forbidden contact with anyone but his interrogators, who, when they questioned him, blasted his starved senses with lights and pounding sounds.
[…] The Cameron–style regression techniques had completely succeeded in destroying the adult he once was, which is precisely what they were designed to do. “The extended torture visited upon Mr. Padilla has left him damaged, both mentally and physically,” his lawyer told the court. “The government’s treatment of Mr. Padilla has robbed him of his personhood.” A psychiatrist who assessed him concluded that he “lacks the capacity to assist in his own defense.” The Bush–appointed judge insisted that Padilla was fir to stand trial, however. The fact that he even had a public trial makes Padilla’s case extraordinary. Thousands of other prisoners being held in U.S.–run prisons—who, unlike Padilla, are not U.S. citizens—have been put through a similar torture regimen, with none of the accountability of a civillian trial. 44
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Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn 50
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Developmentalism was so staggeringly successful for a time that the Southern Cone of Latin America became a potent symbol for poor countries around the world: here was proof that with smart, practical policies, aggressively implemented, the class divide between the First and Third World could actually be closed. 55
And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrong–headed but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality. The enormous benefit of having corporate views funneled through academic, or quasi–academic, institutions not only kept the Chicago School flush with donations, but, in short order, spawned the global network of right–wing think tanks that would churn out the counterrevolution’s foot soldiers world–wide. 56
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Suharto then send out his soldiers to hunt down the four to five thousand leftists on his “shooting lists,” as the CIA referred to them; the U.S. Embassy received regular reports on their progress. As the information came in, the CIA crossed names off their lists until they were satisfied that the Indonesian left had been annihilated. 67
Corporatism, or “corporativism,” originally referred to Mussolini’s model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society—government, businesses and trade unions—all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all–out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth. 86
All Argentines were in some way enlisted as witnesses to the erasure of their fellow citizens, yet most people claimed not to know what was going on. THere is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide–eyed knowing and eyes–closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did no know what nobody could deny.” 91
The Latin American operation was modeled on Hitler’s “Night and Fog.” In 1941, Hitler decreed that resistance fighters in Nazi–occupied countries would be brought to Germany to “vanish in the night and fog.” Several high–profile Nazis took refuge in Chile and Argentina, and there is some speculation that they may have trained the Southern Cone intelligence agencies in these tactics. 91
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Rodolfo Walsh, a gregarious renaissance man, a writer of crime fiction and award–winning short stories, Walsh was also a super sleuth able to crack military codes and spy on the spies. His greatest investigative triumph took place when he was working as a journalist in Cuba, where he managed to intercept and decode a CIA telex that blew the cover of the Bay of Pigs invasion. That information is what allowed Castro to prepare for and defend against the invasion. 94
The letter [Walsh’s Open Letter to the Military Junta] begins with an account of the generals’ terror campaign, its use of “maximum torture, unending and metaphysical,” as well as the involvement of the CIA in training the Argentine police. After listing the methods and grave sites in excruciating detail, Walsh abruptly switches gears: “These events, which stir the conscience of the civilized world, are not, however, the greatest suffering inflicted on the Argentinean people, nor the worst violation for human rights which you have committed. It is in the economic policy of this government where one discovers not only the explanation for the crimes, but a greater atrocity which punishes millions of human beings through planned misery… You only have to walk around greater Buenos Aires for a few hours ro check the speed with which such a policy transforms the city into a ‘shantytown’ of ten million people.” 95
The day after writing the letter, on a trip to Buenos Aries to distribute copies around to dissidents was ambushed by 10 soldiers at a supposed meeting to discuss a disappeared colleague.
Walsh, whose motto was “It isn’t a crime to talk; getting arrested is the crime,” immediately pulled out his gun and began firing. He injured one of the soldiers and drew their fire; he was dead by the time the car arrived at the Navy School of Mechanics. Walsh’s body was burned and dumped in a river. 96
The leaders of the government had explicitly called for Walsh to be captured alive.
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To the extent that killings by the state were acknowledged, they were justified by the juntas on the grounds that they were fighting a war against dangerous Marxist terrorists, funded and controlled by the KGB. If the juntas used “dirty” tactics, it was because their enemy was monstrous. Using language that sounds eerily familiar today, Admiral Massera called it a “war for freedom and against tyranny… a war against those who favor death and by those of us who favor life… We are fighting against nihilists, against agents of destruction whose only objective is destruction itself, although they disguise themselves with social crusades.” 96
Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands ad the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people. 102
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“the only transcendental theology: solidarity” —Osvaldo Bayer 112
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In a way, what happened in the Southern Cone in the seventies is that it was treated as a murder scene when it was, in fact, the site of an extraordinarily violent armed robbery. “It was as if that blood, the blood of the disappeared, covered up the economic program,” Acuna told me. 125
To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all pervasive system. Simone de Beauvoir, 126
Foreign monopolies impose crops on us, they impose chemicals that pollute our earth, impose technology and ideology. All this through the oligarchy which owns the land and controls the politics. But we must remember—the oligarchy is also controlled, by the very same monopolies, the very same Ford Motors, Monsanto, Philip Morris. It’s the structure we have to change. This is what I have come to denounce. That’s all. Sergio Tomasella, 127
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The Falklands War, described by Jose Luis Borges: “a fight between two bald men over a comb.” 137
This is where Friedman’s crisis theory became self–reinforcing. The more the global economy followed his prescriptions, with floating interest rates, deregulated prices and export–oriented economies, the more crisis–prone the system became, producing more and more of precisely the type of melt–downs he had identified as the only circumstances under which governments would take more of his radical advice. 159
That meant that when Reagan and Thatcher came to power in the eighties, their highly ideological administrations were essentially able to harness the two institutions [The World Bank and the IMF] for their own ends, rapidly increasing their power and turning them into the primary vehicles for the advancement of the corporatist crusade. 163
The principle was simple: countries in crisis desperately need emergency aid to stabilize their currencies. When privatization and free–trade policies are packaged together with a financial bailout, countries have little choice but to accept the whole package. The really clever part was that economists themselves knew that free–trade had nothing to do with ending a crisis, but that information was expertly “obfuscated.” […] “no significant case of trade reform in a developing country in the 1980s took place outside the context of a serious economic crisis.” 165
In other words: “Want to save your country? Sell it off.”
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…not only did the ANC renege on Mandela’s original pledge of “the nationalisation of the mines, banks and monopoly industry” but because of the debt [racked up by the pro–apartheid white government], it was doing the opposite—selling off national assets to make food in the debts of its oppressors. 212
In the end, South Africa has ended up witha twisted case of reparations in reverse, with the white businesses that reaped enormous profits from black labor during the apartheid years paying not a cent in reparations, but the victims of apartheid continuing to send large paychecks to their former victimizers. And how do they raise money for this generosity? By stripping the states of its assets through privatization—a modern form of the very looting that the ANC had been so intent on avoiding when t agreed to negotiations, hoping to prevent a repeat of Mozambique. Unlike what happened in Mozambique, however, where civil servants broke machinery, stuffed their pockets, and then fled, in South Africa the dismantling of the state and the pillaging of its coffers continue today. 213
After more than a decade since South Africa made its decisive turn toward Thatcherism, the results are scandalous:
- Since 1994, the year the ANC took power, the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled, from 2 million to 4 million in 2006.
- Between 1991 and 2002, the unemployment rate for black South Africans more than doubled, from 23 percent to 48 percent.
- Of South Africa’s 35 million black citizens, only five thousand earn more than $60,000 a year. The number of whites in that income bracket is twenty times higher, and many earn far more than that amount.
215
Russia and Poland got the same shit deal South Africa did.
Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago–style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. 228
But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile—it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the west. 229
The scandal wasn’t just that Russia’s public riches were auctioned off for a fraction of their worth—it was also that, in true corporatist style, they were purchased with public money. As the Moscow Times journalist Matt Bivens and Jonas Bernstein put it, “a few hand–picked men took over Russia’s state–developed oil fields for free, as part of a giant shell game in which one arm of government paid another arm.” […] In other words, the Russian people fronted the money for the looting of their own country. 233
…quick and dirty deals were actively encouraged by Western powers at every stage as the fastest way to kick–start the economy. National salvation through the harnessing of greed was the closest thing Russia’s Chicago Boys and their advisers had to a plan for what they were going to do after they finished destroying Russia’s institutions. 241
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Today I resigned from the staff of the International Monetary Fund after over twelve years, and after 1000 days of official Fund work in the field, hawking your medecine to governments and to peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. To me resignation is a priceless liberation, for with it I have taken the first big step to that place where I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples… THe blood is so much, you know, it runs in rivers. It dries up, too; cakes all over me; sometimes I feel that there is not enough soap in the entire world to cleanse me from the things that I did do in your name. Davison Budhoo, 261
In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more tnat the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which “‘screaming–in–pain’ governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.”
After the letter was published, the government of Trinidad commissioned two independent studies to investigate the allegations and found that they were correct: the IMF had inflated and fabricated numbers, with tremendously damaging results to the country. 262
In an extraordinary act of interference with a sovereign nation’s political process, the IMF refused to release the money until it had commitments from all four main candidates that they would stick to the new rules if they won. With the country effectively held at ransom, the IMG was triumphant: each candidate pledged his support in writing. 270
(Before the IMF’s demands, two of the candidates had run openly anti–IMF campaigns.)
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When Rumsfeld joined the cabinet of George W. Bush in 2001, it was with a personal mission to reinvent warfare for the twenty–first century—turning it into something more psychological than physical, more spectacle than struggle, and far more profitable than it had ever been before. 284
From a military perspective, these sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition. But from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one: not a flash–in–the–pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture. 301
What passes for debate is restricted to individual cases of war profiteering and corruption scandals, as well as the usual hand–wringing about the failure of government to adequately oversee private contractors—rarely about the much broader and deeper phenomenon of what it means to be engaged in a fully privatized war built to have no end. 306
“Ch 15: A corporatist state—removing the revolving door, putting in an archway.”
It’s hard to believe—but then again, that was pretty much Washington’s game plan for Iraq: shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all okay with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food. In Iraq, this cycle of culture erasing and culture replacing was not theoretical; it all unfolded in a matter of weeks. 339
In other words, the U.S. government presence in Iraq during the first year of its economic experiment had been a mirage—there had been no government, just a funnel to get U.S. taxpayer and Iraqi oil dollars to foreign corporations, completely outside the law. In this way, Iraq represented the most extreme expression of the anti–state counterrevolution—a hollow state, where, as the courts finally established, there was no there, there.
I don’t quite know what that last clause means either. But the court decision referenced was that in which Custer Battles—a contractor accused of blatant fraudulent activities in Iraq—appealed and won on the grounds that the CPA was in fact not a government at all, that Iraq was in fact outside of US law (under which the initial verdict was reached), as well as outside whatever Iraqi system of governance was being put into place.
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Put simply, if Iraqis were allowed to freely elect the next government, and f that government had real power, Washing would have to give up on two of the war’s main goals: access to Iraq for U.S. military bases and full access to Iraq for U.S. multinationals. […] Within his first six months in the job, he [Paul Bremer] had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections—hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.. 364
In the first three and a half years of occupation, and estimated 61,500 Iraqis were captured and imprisoned by U.S. forces, usually with methods designed to “maximize capture shock.” Roughly 19,000 remained in custody in the spring of 2007. Inside the prisons more shocks followed: buckets of freezing water; snarling, teeth–baring German shepherds; punching and kicking; and sometimes the shock of electrical current running from live wires. 366
That is what happens with projects to build model societies in other people’s countries. The cleansing campaigns are rarely premeditated. It is only when the people who live on the land refuse to abandon their past that the dream of the clean slate morphs into its doppelgänger, the scorched earth—only then that the dream of total creation morphs into a campaign of total destruction. 364
It turns out that funding Iraqis to rebuild their own country is more efficient than hiring lumbering multinationals who don’t know the country or the language, surround themselves with $900–a–day mercenaries and spend as much as 55 percent of their contract budgets on overhead. 375
In effect, the law called for Iraq’s publicly owned oil reserves, the country’s main source of revenues, to be exempted from democratic control and run instead by a powerful, wealthy oil dictatorship, which would exist alongside Iraq’s broken and ineffective government. 377
The law passed. But not at first, when people were paying attention: it wasn’t rammed through until the insurgency and surge started to cause so much violence that Iraqis had better things to worry about then legislation.
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It was the weeping faces of these fishing families and other like them in Thailand and Indonesia that had triggered the historic outpouring of international generosity after the tsunami—it had been their relatives piled up in mosques, their wailing mothers trying to identify a drowned baby, their children swept to sea. Yet for communities like Arguam Bay, the “reconstruction” meant nothing less than the deliberate destruction of their culture and way of life and the theft of their land. As Kumary said, the entire reconstruction process would result in “victimizing the victims, exploiting the exploited.” 389
“Governments have largely failed in their responsibility to provide land for permanent housing,” the report concluded. “They have stood by or been complicit as land has been grabbed and coastal communities pushed aside in favor of commercial interests.” 399
Almost everyone I met commented on what one preist called “the NGO wild life”: high–end hotels, beachfront villas, and the ultimate lightning rod for popular rage, the brand–new white sport utility vehicles. All the aid organizations had them, monstrous things that were far too wide and powerful for the country’s narrow dirt roads. All day long they went roaring past the camps, forcing everyone to eat their dust, their logos billowing on flags in the breeze—Oxfam, World Vision, Save the CHildren—as if they were visitors from a far–off NGO World. In a country as hot as Sri Lanka, these cars, with their tinted windows and blasting air conditioners, were more than modes of transportation, they were rolling microclimates. 403
———
Blackwater has a 600 acre, $40-$50 million dollar compound in North Carolina. 416
When Katrina hit, FEMA had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors. Similarly, when it came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors, the army contracted out the hob to one of its major contractors, MPRI—it no longer had the know–how in–house. 417
Under Bush, the state still has all the trappings of a government—the impressive buildings, presidential press briefings, policy battles—but it no more does the actual work of governing than the employees at Nike’s Beaverton campus stitch running shoes. 418
No Conspiracies Required:
The truth is at once less sinister and more dangerous [than the current american conspiracies]. An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short–term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis–creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dot–com collapse all demonstrate. Our common addiction to dirty, nonrenewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters (up 430% since 1975) and wars waged for control over scarce resources (not just Iraq and Afghanistan but lower–intensity conflicts such as those that rage in Nigeria, Colombia and Sudan), which in turn create terrorist blowback (a 2007 study calculated that the number of terrorist attacks since the start of the Iraq war had increased sevenfold). 426
———
The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas [Developmentalism] were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures. When resistance was fierce, they were defeated with overt violence—rolled over by Pinochet’s, Yeltsin’s, and Deng Xiaoping’s tanks. At other times, they were simply betrayed through what John Williamson called “voodoo politics.” […] It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place. 451
“barbarian capitalism” —Daniel Ortega 452
In 2005, Latin America made up 80 percent of the IMF’s total lending portfolio; in 2007, the continent represented just 1 percent—a sea of change in only two years. 457
I watched two recently, both stunning and amazing and a little bit unnerving, even disturbing. Both in the same style, mostly mute but with completely stunning and sometimes frightening visuals (frighteningly beautiful as well).
Manufactured Landscapes follows around Edward Burtynsky, photographer of massive human altered environment. From quarries to unfathomably large chinese factories to tankers washed ashore in Bangladesh being slowly disassembled by wiry barefoot peasants to large towns being wholesale destroyed because in a few months the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam will rend them 100 feet underwater, Burtynsky has photographed some cool stuff. The documentary puts things in scale a bit for someone who’s never know anything but a pleasant and warm home, wanton mobility, and abundant food.
Food is the second one, namely Our Daily Bread. The only dialog is that of various food workers talking to each other during their lunch breaks, none in english, and none subtitled. The idea is to take a look at where our food really comes from now that multinational agricorporations have hijacked our food supply. Giant greenhouses of veggies growing on 12’ trellises, with robot pesticide dispensers riding the long rows hissing whatever substances which, deemed by whatever governing bodies as only toxic to insects and pests – somehow not to the food itself nor the humans all to ready to eat it. Chickens in barns the size of a football field, beak to beak, being sucked up by an elaborate cross between a crane and a tractor and spit out into cartons for shipping off to the factory where some poor old lady sits in a chair under a line of upside down gliding carcasses slitting the heads off those where the machine couldn’t quite manage. It’s really brutal how all this works, but some stark beauty shines through, the grime of blood running on the floor contrasted with smooth dark chrome walls and apparatus.
These two really show that however advanced and scientific the world gets, man, is it still fucked up. You can’t have one without the other, and you have to be impressed by both.
John Lane
We have come to talk of music and drama and art and architecture as if they were technical words for remote abstractions or exceptional luxuries, but what is civilization for, if it is not to produce poetry, music, beauty and courtesy? These things are nothing in themselves unless they have a use for life… William Richard Lethaby, 15
Keats: Negative Capability 24
Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in the heart, not in his tongue… As you speak so is your heart. Paracelsus, 44
The greatest thing that a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and to tell what it saw in a plain way. Hindreds of people can talk for one who cna thing, and thousands can think for the one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, philosophy, and religion – all in one. John Ruskin, 48
Although human ingenuity makes various inventions, corresponding by various machines to the same end, it will never discover any inventions more beautiful, more appropriate or more direct than nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo Da Vinci, 55
On the novelty of landscape, John Ruskin, 56
For the Native Americans, art and religion, art and life, were not separate; nor were the beautiful and the functional. Art, beauty, and spirituality were so firmly intertwined that words neither existed nor were needed to separate them. This wholeness was a function of the fact that everything in their universe worked together: poetry didn’t exist apart from ritual, and ritual didn’t exist apart from vision and meditation and even healing. This philosophy of relating all life and all materials permeated even the simplest of objects, a Pawnee drum, a pair of slippers or a Crow medicine bag. 73
The earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with god. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 102
Fritz Lang: Metropolis 139
We must draw our standards from the natural world. We must honor with the humility of the wise the bounds of that natural world and the mystery which lies beyond them, admitting that there is something in the order of being which evidently exceeds all our competence. Vaclav Havel, 143
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wander, not longer marvel, is as good as dead. Albert Einstein, 155
Walt Whitman on religion, 158:
Heaven was here on Earth and the physical and the spiritual could not be divided; they were, are, and always will be the same. [...] The future would see a spirituality of meditation and the contemplation of beauty.
George Monbiot
A take on what will need to be done in the next 50 years to dissuade catastrophic change in the earth’s climate.
Monbiot lays out how badly we1 indeed are frakking the world:
The problem is compounded by the fact that the connection between cause and effect seems so improbable. By turning on the lights, filling the kettle, taking the children to school, driving to the shops, we are condemning other people to death. We never chose to do this. We do not see ourselves as killers. We perform these acts without passion or intent. 22
In his book Perverse Subsidies, published in 2001, Professor Norman Meyers adds the direct payments US corporations recieve from the government to the wider costs they oblige society to carry, and arrives at an annual figure of $2.6 trillion. This is roughly five times as much as the profits they were making at the time his book was written. As well as the annual $362 billion the thirty richest governments were paying their farmers when Perverse Subsidies was published, they were spending some $71 billion on fossil fuels and nuclear power and a staggering $1.1 trillion on road transport. Worldwide, governments pay companies $25 billion a year to wreck forests. 55
He makes the comparison between now with the problem of climate change and WW2 with the problem of brutal fascism/genocide 98. In 60 odd years will people be as quick to vilify our hedonistic, carbon-gulping, wealthy nations as we now do the Nazi party? I’m sure someone witty could clone First they came... to apply here.
Unfortunately for us:
Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money. Cree Indian saying, 170
Monbiot outlines possible solutions he feels could cut back our production of greenhouse gasses significantly enough to sustain a global temperature within +2º (celsius I assume, him being a brit), a point where the oceans will not rise over-dramatically and the world shouldn’t come to an end. But at the last page doesn’t leave me with much more than slight hope. In any case, t’s looking like I’ll be lucky enough to live through some fun times.
1 We here is used to indicate the first world nations. A very small percentage of the world population is responsible for nearly all activities forbearing our current predicament. I am part of this sliver, and the fact that you’ve the leisure time to be wasting your time reading this gains you entrance to the club.
The automobile works honestly. Long before its birth, when it is still just layers of metal and piles of drawings, it diligently murders Malayan coolies and Mexican laborers. It is born in agony! It shreds flesh, blinds eyes, eats lungs, destroys minds. At last, it rolls out of the gates into the world which, before its existence, was known as “bright.” Instantly, it deprives its supposed owner of his old-fashioned peace of mind. Lilac withers, chickens and dreamers dash away in terror. The automobile laconically runs down pedestrians. It gnaws into the side of a barn or else, grinning, it flies down a slope. It can’t be blamed for anything. Its conscience is as clear as Monsieur Citroen’s conscience. It only fulfills its destiny: It is destined to wipe out the world.
Karl Popper
Assigned as part of a political philosophy class I’m taking. A modern look at and criticism of Plato’s The Republic, as well as a good thinking-through of political philosophy.
the fundamental historicism prejudice – the doctrine that the social sciences, if they are to be of any use at all, must be prophetic. 5
[Heraclitus] visualized the world not as an edifice, but rather as one colossal process; not as the sum-total of all things, but rather as the totality of all events, or changes, or facts. ‘Everything is in flux and nothing is at rest’, is the motto of his philosophy. 12
The transition to oligarchy is completed when the rich establish a law that ‘disqualifies from public office all those whose means do not reach the stipulated amount. This change is imposed by force of arms, should threats and blackmail not succeed.’ 41
The transition from democracy to tyranny, Plato says, is most easily brought about by a popular leader who knows how to exploit the class antagonism between the rich and the poor within the democratic state, and who succeeds in building up a bodyguard or a private army of his own. The people who have hailed him first as the chamption of freedom are soon enslaved; and then they must fight for him, in ‘one war after another which he must stir up… because he must make the people feel the need of a general’. 43
And a quick aside, for at page 63 I was reading while watching Office Space and scribbled this in the margin: You know, the Nazis had pieces of flair… they made the Jews wear them.
Peter, Office Space
Man has created new worlds – of language, of music, of poetry, of science; and the most important of these is the world of the moral demands, for equality, for freedom, and for helping the weak. 65
Plato was longing for the lost unity of tribal life
: Only quoted because I came across John Zerzan earlier today via anarchia. I guess there are different ways of working towards a goal.
Platonism vs. The humanitarian theory of justice, 94
the alleged clash between freedom and security, that is, a security guaranteed by the state, turns out to be a chimera. For there is no freedom if it is not secured by the state; and conversely, only a state which is controlled by free citizens can offer them any reasonable security at all. 111
What we need and what we want is to moralize politics, not politicize morals. 113
Whatever authority I may have rests solely upon my knowing how little I know. Socrates, 130
The authoritarian will in general select those who obey, who believe, who respond to his influence. But in doing so, he is bound to select mediocrities. for he excludes those who revolt, who doubt, who dare to resist his influence. 135
A zing on modern schooling:
Instead of encouraging the student to devote himself to his studies for the sake of studying, instead of encouraging in him a real love for his subject and for inquiry, he is encouraged to study for the sake of his personal career; he is led to acquire only such knowledge as is serviceable in getting him over the hurdles which he must clear for the sake of his advancement. In other words, even in the field of science, out methods of selection are based upon an appeal to personal ambition of a somewhat crude form. [...]
It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and out universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better a proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devestating system of education has not utterly ruined them. In spite of the treachery of so many of their leaders, there are quite a number, old as well as young, who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task. 135
Ouch.
Utopian vs. Piecemeal social engineering, 158…. This is almost worth it’s own entire post, we’ll see if I feel like coming back to it anytime soon.
The Abstract Society. 174
That’s the problem. If I thought Al Gore’s movie was as you like to say, fair and balanced, I’d say, everyone should go see it. But why go see propaganda? You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany. You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.
We need a law passed condemning the phrase fair and balanced as outright farcical mania. Seriously america, go fuck yourself and maybe you’ll come back with a bit of sense.
Work is doing something that you’re forced to do. Versus play. Forced play is work. The essay degenerates a bit into ravenous driveling; I’m willing to excuse it. We want a society of play. Helluv’an idea.
The demeaning system of domination I’ve described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it’s not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or—better still—industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are “free” is lying or stupid. You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you’ll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. People who are regimented all their lives, handed off to work from school and bracketed by the family in the beginning and the nursing home at the end, are habituated to heirarchy and psychologically enslaved. Their aptitude for autonomy is so atrophied that their fear of freedom is among their few rationally grounded phobias.
Socrates said that manual laborers make bad friends and bad citizens because they have no time to fulfill the responsibilities of friendship and citizenship. He was right. Because of work, no matter what we do we keep looking at our watches. The only thing “free” about so-called free time is that it doesn’t cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor as a factor of production not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.
On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand—and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure—we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes, except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that shouldn’t make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
Because work is unnecessary except to those whose power it secures, workers are shifted from relatively useful to relatively useless occupations as a measure to assure public order. Anything is better than nothing. That’s why you can’t go home just because you finish early. They want your time, enough of it to make you theirs, even if they have no use for most of it. Otherwise why hasn’t the average work week gone down by more than a few minutes in the past fifty years?
If technology has a role in all this it is less to automate work out of existence than to open up new realms for re/creation.
Life will become a game, or rather many games, but not—as it is now—a zero/sum game.
I do love, but overwhelmingly hate, monkeys.
Our society is a program running under the operating space of earth, and it’s always had a memory leak. We’re leaving cycles open; allocating resources and never returning them to the pool. We’ve already taken all the RAM; for the past 300 years we’ve been eating more and more virtual memory. We’re finally getting to the point where there isn’t any more disk space to spool out. We’ve got to figure out our garbage collection, or the server running humanity and everything else will come tumbling to its knees.
Disneyland is as fun as Des Moines is dull, just as Michael Jordan is as rich as a Nike sweatshop worker is poor
Common wisdom to bourgeois french written by Gustave Flaubert, in and around the 19th century. (Translations are mine, excuse any errors.)
Chat: Les chats sont traîtres. Les appeler tigres de salon. Leur couper la queue pour empècher le vertigo. (Cat: Cats are traitors. Call them the tigers of the living room. Cut their tail to prevent vertigo.)
Lion: Est gêreux. Joue toujours avec une boule. (Lion: is generous. Always playing with a ball.)
Clarinette: En jouer rend aveugle. Ex.: Tous les aveugles jouent de la clarinette. (CLARINET: Playing it blinds. Ex.: All blind people play the clarinet.)
Dieu: Voltaire lui-même l’a dit: “Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.” (God: Voltaire said it himself: “If god didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.)
égoisme: Se plaindre de celui des autres et ne pas s’apercevoir du sien. (Egoism: To complain about that of others, and not perceive your own.)
Républicains: Les républicains ne sont pas tous voleurs, mais les voleurs sont tous républicains. (Republicans: Republicans aren’t all thieves, but thieves are all republicans.)
It all sounds a bit tongue in cheek, but it isn’t.
Thomas More
The book in which the term utopia was first turned, a look at what was wrong with 16th century english society and how the hidden society of Utopos was better.
The book is a set of conversations between Raphael Hythloday (“peddler of nonsense”), a traveler who chanced upon the hidden society of Utopos and lived among it’s peoples for 5 years, and Thomas More, the author fictionalized within his own work.
Utopos is a society in which everybody is equal, everybody is made equal by the abolition of private property. Everyone has what they need drawn from the collective labor of the Utopians, so how could they possibly want anything more?
There are a few disturbing aspects to the society, thus the dubbing of the greek “u-topia” and “eu-topia” meaning no place and godly place. The thing about More’s Utopia is that there’s no way to get from here to there – ‘the institutions cannot be introduced unless they have already been introduced’ xv.
But actually, my dear More (to tell you what I really think), it seems to me that wherever there is private property, where everything is measured in terms of money, it is hardly ever possible for the common good to be served with justice and prosperity, unless you think justice is served when all the best things go to the worst people or that happiness is possible with everything is shared among very few, who themselves are not entirely happy, while the rest are plunged into misery. Hythloday, 46
For why should anyone be suspected of asking too much if he is certain the will never lack anything? Certainly fear of want makes all kinds of animals greedy and rapacious, but only mankind is made so by pride, which makes them consider their own glory enhanced if they excel others in displaying superfluous possessions; in the Utopian scheme of things there is no place for all for such a vice. 68
Indeed they are amazed that any mortal can take delight in the dubious sparkle of a tiny gem or precious stone when he can look at a star or even at the sun, or how anyone could be so insane as to imagine that he is nobler because of fine-spun woolen thread, since that wool (however fine-spun) was once worn by a sheep, which was at the same time nothing more than a sheep. 78
The utopian understanding of god:
unknown, eternal, infinite, inexplicable, diffused throughout this whole universe not physically but by his power, in a manner that is beyond human comprehension. 116
From my observation and experience of all the flourishing nations everywhere, what is taking place, so help me god, is nothing but a conspiracy of the rich, as it were, who look out for themselves under the pretext of serving the commonwealth. 132
Daniel H. Pink
You’re going to need one, according to Pink. With the forces of cheap labor halfway across the world, cheap domestic products available in abundance here at home, and robot computers increasingly able to do what humans used to make their livings at; you’re looking at unemployment.
Pink argues that the american workforce needs to hedge it’s bet on the right brain abilities instead of the left, which we’ve relied on to get where we are now. He cites design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning as the six Ideas most important to the new “conceptual age” worker.
Tell the truth, I hope I won’t have to work a day in my life. But this new sort of industry Pink says is coming out of the woodwork looks lots better to me than cashing people’s checks, or just sitting in front of a computer programming. I guess I’ll take what I can get.
Reading left to right exercises the left side of the brain, just as moving your right hand does. (Contralateralization). 18
Left brain is sequential, the right simultaneous. 18
Abundance has produced an ironic result: the very triumph of L-Directed thinking has placed a premium on less rational, more R-Directed sensibilities – beauty, spirituality, emotion. For businesses, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique, and meaningful. 33
In a study, patients recovering from surgery in adequately and naturally lit rooms required 21% less pain medication then those in traditional hospital beds. 82
Games are the most elevated form of investigation. Albert Einstien quoted on 183
.
Statistics on the state of the world.
Our society is in a state of collective denial that has no precedent in history, in terms of its scale and implications.
It’s debatable how much oil is left, as to the fact that none of the OPEC countries keep accurate books. But the most optimistic speculators assume no more then 3 trillion barrels remain on earth.
If 2 trillion barrels of oil or more indeed remain, the topping point lies far away in the 2030s. The “growing” and “cheap” parts of the oil-supply equation are feasible until then, at least in principle, and we have enough time to bring in the alternatives to oil. If only 1 trillion barrels remain, however, the topping point will arrive some time soon, and certainly before this decade is out. The “growing” and “cheap” parts of the oil-supply equation become impossible, and there probably isn’t even enough time to make a sustainable transition to alternatives.
Half the world’s oil lies in its 100 largest fields, and all of these hold 2 billion barrels or more, and almost all of them were discovered more than a quarter of a century ago. Consider the recent record of discoveries of giant oil- and gas-fields of over 500 million barrels of oil or oil equivalent. Half a billion barrels – the definition of a “giant” field – sounds a lot. But since the world is eating up more than 80 million barrels of oil a day at the moment, it is in fact less than a week’s global supply. In 2000 there were 16 discoveries of 500 million barrels of oil equivalent or bigger. In 2001 there were nine. In 2002 there were just two. In 2003 there were none.
But in 1985, they [OPEC nations] began to – how shall I put it? – massage the data. Kuwait was the first to give in to temptation. They found that their reserves had gone up overnight from 64 to 90 billion barrels. In 1988, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Iran and Iraq all played the same card. Abu Dhabi had been so needlessly conservative that their reserves went up from 31 to 92 billion barrels. They surely must have employed some incompetent geologists. How could they have overlooked 60 billion barrels? Finally, in 1990, Saudi Arabia decided it too had been conservative, hiking its total from 170 to 258 billion barrels.
Is there any chance that the early topping point of oil production is somehow wrong, all just a bad dream? I am sorry to say that I think not. It is important to realise that the early toppers are not advocates or agitators by choice. They tend to have high residual affection for the industry they have spent their lives in.
The peak of oil discovery was 1965. 41 years ago.
And it’s not just that we’re running out of oil, we can no longer extract and process what oil there is into economically viable forms at the rate of demand.
Slowly but surely the US military is being converted into a global oil-protection service Michael Klare
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
College tuition today is extortion. And not just at MIT. The U of M charges $8,000/semester, and that doesn’t cover your room and board or your books.
my ideal world: a high school girl in Vietnam with a cable modem attending all the MIT classes that she wants. Philip Greenspun
And why not?
Daniel Quinn
You ought to go and read this book right now. There’s a summary on Wikipedia, I’d recommend it. But I have a few snips to make you read through.
The sense that something is very wrong with a certain style of living 11, or that something big is being kept from you. where, coming from the guy, 45 I get it all the time, I’ve also always wanted to find a teacher like Ishmael.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual. Ishmael, 25
having impure thoughts about saving the world... Narrator, 28
Takers thought that the world needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order. 71
In order to become fully human, man had to pull himself out of the slime. And all this is the result. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. Narrator, 75
The world was given to man to turn into a paradise, but he’s always screwed it up, because he’s fundamentally flawed. He might be able to do something about this if he knew how he ought to live, but he doesn’t – and he never will, because no knowledge about that is obtainable. So, however hard man might labor to turn the world into a paradise, he’s probably just going to go on screwing it up. Ishmael, 89
Takers explanation for why things are going badly in the world: something is fundamentally wrong with people. Yet Leavers lived in concert with nature for three million years before the Takers branched off ten thousand years ago. 118
The agricultural revolution sparked by the first Takers, is the manifesto on which the entire Taker society is based, as it was then, and as it will be until the Takers die off. 153
I need to read the Bible.
Quinn posits that parts of of the old testament are Leaver mythology, concerning the Takers.
Adam and Eve (Adam meaning Earth or Man; Eve meaning Life or Woman) in The Fall of Man, god casts the Takers from his kingdom with a vengeance. The Takers, having eaten from the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, now are able to decide who lives (themselves) and who dies (anything preventing them from living). Adam said yes to Life, and began to grow without limit. 180-81
Cain and Abel represent the Takers and Leavers, Abel a shepherd, Cain a farmer. God favors Abel, yet Cain killed Abel. God then curses Cain to have to wander the earth the rest of his life. Having eaten the forbidden fruit, they rapidly proliferate, moving south, and killing herders and gathers. 173
Even though the story of Adam and Eve made so little sense to us Takers (because it is Leaver mythology, demonizing the Takers), it’s a big deal because we directly identify with Adam: he is us. 184
There’s nothing in the past for [Leavers]. The past is dreck. The past is something to escape from, something to be escaped from. Narrator, 210
Whereas the Leavers infallibly have a rich connection back to the beginning of the earth – their method of living has evolved through thousands of generations stretching back millions of years. None of the Leavers just invented their cultures, the Takers did.
And now the Takers have all but abolished that Leaver wisdom. 205-7
Taker culture sees Leavers leading an incredibly grim life, but they actually really don’t. 220
Yes. Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, “Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether or not you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds in the air, They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?” In [Taker] culture, the overwhelming answer to that is, Hell no! Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering in barns. Narrator, 228
The Takers are those who know good and evil, and the Leavers those who live in the hands of the Gods. 229
Takers assume that they are the pinnacle of the world, the best that it gets. It’s inherent in their culture – the earth was made by the gods in their name.
The Takers jumped out of the hand of the gods – they’ve eschewed the evolution that ruled all species and ushered the Takers to the point at which they jumped off the wagon.
They’ve removed the need for natural selection by deciding they knew what was right and what was wrong. They don’t need to adapt to their surroundings, they force their surroundings to adapt to their needs. 239
Takers: the world belongs to man; Leavers: man belongs to the world. 239
Yet the world does not belong to man, the takers have always been right.
[Man’s] destiny is to be the first to learn that creatures like man have a choice: They can try to thwart the gods and perish in the attempt – or they can stand aside and make room for all the rest. But it’s more then that. His destiny is to be the father of them all – I don’t mean by direct descent. By giving all the rest their change – the whales and the dolphins and the chimps and the raccoons – he becomes in some sense their progenitor… Oddly enough, it’s even grander than the destiny the Takers dreamed up for us. Narrator, 242
With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
Radical ideas from radically smart people:
We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves.
Call school off. Turn them into apartments. Roger Schank
Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish forever.
This is no game.
George Orwell
First book I’ve ever ‘read’ as an audiobook. I don’t know if I liked it. Digressing for a moment from the actual book, it seemed that listening on my iPod (with audiobooks set to faster) took a phenomenally long time, the book clocked in at just under 10 hours. I usually read quick, and the audio can’t go as fast as my eyes without being incomprehensible.
I also usually like to make notes in the margin of pages, fold the corners of pages down to mark off stuff that merits a second look after I get all done with the book, which doesn’t work well with a recording.
But back to the book itself, I’d never read 1984. Animal farm, by Orwell, was covered in two of my classes at some point along in school, and both times I read it I made note to find a copy of 1984, but just never got around to it.
The whole NSA spying thing and all the Orwellian accusations being thrown around the political arena lately finally convinced me, and I’m glad society has yet to come to Orwell’s visions.
The scariest part for me wasn’t the civilian surveillance, but the government control of history. Control of the present is the equivalent to control of the past, also equivalent to power.
Somewhere in part three, where O’Brien digresses from torturing Winston long enough to explain what the aims of the Party were – power over everything.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
Their ability to always be right, and be able to dupe the population of Oceania into believing their correctness, gives the government an air of beneficent fairness. They’re doing society such a favor, always winning the war, always improving production.
Their ability to detain and torture whomever they wish at the aptly named Ministry of Love cements that illusion of societal unity – anyone not with the party is dead, but not until their subjugation and capitulation to the party ideals (2+2 always will equal 5).
In the excerpts Winston managed to read from Goldstein’s the book, clearly the entire populated world of 1984 is a complete sham, three societies constructed to do nothing but alternately fight each other, with all individual thought stifled entirely, just to serve the upper members of the inner parties desire for power.
The whole domination of information by the party is disturbing because it’s happening now. The evolution of neocon justification for war with Iraq could have come straight from an office in the Ministry of Truth. Although it is still archived in its original form and retrievable, neither the media nor political leaders are doing anything about the lies, only echoing party lines.
The rats are funny in that they really epitomize the whole society that Winston is so sublimely against. Peoples lives are led for them through the telescreen. They’re awakened, exercised, and indoctrinated – not to mention monitored.
Big Brother has created complete control over all of them, to the point they’re leading their lives through a dilapidated and grungy London without being the slightest bit human.
Newspeak is a fun idea – the language that completely eliminates the human capacity of thought. By compressing usable vocabulary to it’s most basic and then building upon it with simple modifiers humans lose the ability to reason beyond what the state sponsored dictionary will allow them.
When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation which recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people
How fake are those pinups?
Scott Adams
Philosophical fiction from Scott Adams, the guy behind Dilbert. Real good stuff, and available for free.
I can’t really pull together any coherent thoughts right now, so here’s a dump of quotes.
A belief in god would demand one hundred obsessive devotion, influencing every waking moment of this brief life on earth. But your four billion so-called believers do not live their lives in this fashion, except for a few. The majority believe in the usefulness of their beliefs – an earthly and practical utility – but they do not believe in the underlying reality. 28
The best any human can do is to pick a delusion that helps to get him through the day. This is why people of different religions can generally live in peace. At some level, we all suspect that other people don’t believe their own religion any more then we believe ours. 29
The human brain is a delusion generator. The delusions are fueled by arrogance – the arrogance that humans are the center of the world, that we alone are endowed with the magical properties of souls and morality and free will and love. We assume that an omnipotent God has a unique interest in our progress and activities while providing all the rest of creation for our playground. We believe that god – because he thinks the same way we do – must be more interested in our lives then in the rocks and trees and plants and animals. 34
Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society. 65
You can change only what people know, not what they do. 107
Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect. Conversation reminds us we are part of a greater whole, connected in some way that transcends duty or bloodline or commerce. Conversation can be many things, but it can never be useless. 114
Awareness is about unlearning. It is the recognition that you don’t know as much as you thought you knew. 124
The fifth level of awareness is the Avatar. The Avatar understands the mind is an illusion generator, not a window to reality. The avatar recognizes science as a belief system, albeit a useful one. An Avatar recognizes gods power as expressed in probability and the inevitable recombination of God’s consciousness. 137
Your shadow is not a physical thing; it is an impression, a perception, left by a physical things. It is a boundary, not an object. 88
One of the best sites on the web. Manifesto’s are publishes intermittently, in batches, and consistently rock.
the people who make the most noise often have the least to shout about.
In some way, people believe that if you are permeable, if you are a good listener, you don’t have the quality of somebody with a firm attitude. But this is not true. I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities – stubbornness and a capacity to listen- might look like they are opposites, but they are not. This is what, fundamentally, I got from my mother.
If you are the first in the class, I guess – I never experienced that – but I guess you grow up with the feeling that other people will learn from you. You are teaching others, not the opposite. And I feel that there is a moment when, unfortunately, because of that, you stop learning. You stop absorbing. And life is about learning, about grabbing every occasion. And art is about that; art is robbery in the noblest sense. It is taking things. Art! Art! In every sense.
The structure, the complexity, the diversity of our lives, everything we know, everything that we have taken for granted, that looked solid and non-negotiable, suddenly looks contingent. All this is a great tottering pile balanced on a ball, a ball that is about to start rolling downhill.
And we find ourselves in an extraordinary position. This is the first mass political movement to demand less, not more. The first to take to the streets in pursuit of austerity. The first to demand that our luxuries, even our comforts, are curtailed.
An elite of the rich and powerful have stolen your dignity, your opportunity, your joy in exercising your genius, your self-esteem, your value in our society. This is a disservice to the vast majority as citizens, as useful workers, and as customers looking for products and services made well and with pride. It’s destroying the social fabric of our society, our environment, and the middle class. We need to create a new entrepreneurial economy, one driven by creativity and curiosity and by passion and respect. One that is in the service of people and not profits.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we’re in. It’s been happening steadily for the past four years, and nobody said peep. The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war now that they see the guy is a little weak, they’re kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn’t bite back. It’s cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody’s done about this issue that’s killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It’s fucking sick. I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are. Joe Dante
Director of a zombie film in which servicemen killed in Iraq wiggle out of their graves and into voting booths so they can vote against bush, not happy with the state of american affairs.
The movie is playing 10pm tomorrow night, on showtime.
Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody’s afraid – it’s uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren’t people upset? Every minute, somebody’s dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish a religious theocracy in Iraq? It doesn’t seem to me quite worth it. Joe Dante
Above all, forget the nonsensical idea that the economy needs us to buy in excess. Neither the planet nor our souls can afford that kind of economy. Why work ourselves to death to buy things we don’t need in order to provide jobs to keep ourselves working? If we backed off from mindless buying and searched instead for true meaning, we would be able to spend less, borrow less, earn less, and reclaim our time, attention, and serenity—our lives.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together. Dwight D. Eisenhower
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
students have always possessed far less knowledge than they should, or think they have. But in the past, ignorance tended to be a source of shame and motivation. Students were far more likely to be troubled by not-knowing, far more eager to fill such gaps by learning. As one of my reviewers, Stanley Trachtenberg, once said, “It’s not that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t care about what they don’t know.”
Instead of a mainstream reverence for those who produce or appreciate works that represent the summit of human achievement, we have a corporatized and commodified culture that hypes the latest trend, the next new thing.
Want your materialistic, easily-misled wife to stop being such a frigid bitch? Buy her a diamond! Did your husband decide to increase your consumer debt in order to buy you a pair of earrings that were mined at gunpoint by children in Africa? Reward him with grudging sex and a temporary cessation of your relentless nagging!
I have these feelings sometimes that everything our society based on is dead wrong. Am I just jaded?
Americans basically want peace and prosperity. But right now, our economy is driving the opposite. In order to secure the oil we need, we’re trapped in a major war in Iraq. The commuting, shopping and activities that comprise our day-to-day lives are draining our pocketbooks and keeping families apart. Again, it’s not Jane Q. Public’s fault, it’s not the market’s fault. It’s the government’s fault for laying out the rules so poorly.
This is me, exactly.
According to the Future Foundation, we are increasingly curbing our enthusiasm for profligate consumption, and health and environment-threatening behaviours. Gone is the guilt-free pleasure-seeker, to be replaced by the model well-meaning citizen, the New Puritan – a tag interchangeable with neo-Cromwellian, if you really want to seal its 17th century origins – who thinks through the consequences of activities previously thought of as pleasurable and invariably elects to live without them.
Our New Puritans become less like neurotic killjoys and more like early adopters, with an enhanced ability to recognise the pitfalls of contemporary life.