Category Archives: politics

Stupid? Or liars?

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I’m afraid I’m starting believe that 1st world institutions – as a whole – are not capable of responding to the oncoming train that is global warming.

It seems mind-numbing, but Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said snowfall in D.C. has had an effect on policymakers’ attitudes. “It makes it more challenging for folks not taking time to review the scientific arguments,” said Bingaman, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

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As the threat of the crisis grows more intense, Congress cannot act. The environmental consequences are likely to be severe and unforgiving. *

Protip for our largely old, white, male, not very bright solons: Weather does not equal climate and the plural of anecdote is not data.

The way things are playing out in Washington doesn’t make me hopeful – here’s John Cole’s accurate analysis of how things work – different topic, but the same dynamic applies (big quote, but read the whole thing. NOW.).

But here is the thing- we can’t do anything about it. I’m sure the House could pass a bill containing a small stipend for Americorps volunteers- in fact, I bet it would get a good bit of support. It might even be very popular with the entire country, as well as being good policy! Likewise, I bet almost all the Democrats and even some Republicans in the Senate would be in favor of passing that bill.

Except the bill would never pass, and I’m surprised James does not recognize that he is operating in a fantasy world. Once the bill hit the Senate, the fun would begin. Even though in the past there were probably numbers of Republicans who supported Americorps, the large majority of them would just flat out say no.

Wanting to negotiate in good faith, having never learned a lesson ever, the Democrats like Baucus and Conrad would slow down the debate to give the Republicans time to participate. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe would work for a couple weeks with Senate leadership, get a couple things they want in the bill, then sigh and utter their public regrets that they just can not support the bill. Chuck Todd, the Politico, and other dullards in the beltway media would run a few pieces wondering why Obama hasn’t reached out more to moderates. While this is happening, the wurlitzer’s media blitz starts.
First off, we all know who loves Americorp- the Clenis. From there, it is all downhill. Breitbart would seize upon the bill, and claim that the anonymous stipend is just President Obama seeking to pay off his campaign volunteers- just like the KHMER ROUGE, POL POT, STALIN, AND DUVALIER! They would find some innocuous aspect of Americorps and turn it into something that is no doubt worse than Hitler.
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The subservient GOP drones in the blogs would pick up everything Breitbart has said. Instapundit and Reason magazine would wake from their glibertarian slumber to denounce this “vast, wasteful expansion of government.” The Fonzi of Freedom, Nick Gillespie, would make fifty idiotic web videos decrying the bill, in between appearances on Fox News and penning stupid op-eds with Matt Welch in the NY Post. Pete Suderman and Megan McCardle would exchange links to each other, giving us all an eye into the steamy world of glibertarian pillow talk. Welch would do his own part, pointing out that the French have something very similar to Americorps, and he really enjoyed their services while he and his wife were in France, but now that they are here in America and rake in enough money that they don’t need those services, he will loudly and in the most smug manner possible oppose Americorps. Also, he is still pissed that his car was not accepted for Cash for Clunkers.

Malkin would start printing the addresses of Americorps volunteers, and would have her internet sleuths post a facebook picture of an Americorps worker drunk four years ago while in college. By this time, the noise machine is in full swing, and Rush, Glenn Beck, Hannity, the Heritage Foundation, the rest of the Koch funded “think tanks,” Fox News, the NY Post and the Washington Examiner, the NR, and the Weekly Standard and the other wingnut welfare publications would all embark on another disinformation campaign. *

Chris Hedges says something I think is true: it’s getting to be time to turn our backs on globalized capitalism – eschew WallyMart, expand the garden, raise a pig, redouble efforts to buy local – and transition to a simultaneously backyard (most physical feeds) and world-spanning (network infoculture) mode. Direct opposition can’t be the main approach; power/media/system ju-jitsu is called for.

All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead. We should stop wasting energy trying to reform or appeal to it. This does not mean the end of resistance, but it does mean very different forms of resistance. It means turning our energies toward building sustainable communities to weather the coming crisis, since we will be unable to survive and resist without a cooperative effort. These communities, if they retreat into a pure survivalist mode without linking themselves to the concentric circles of the wider community, the state and the planet, will become as morally and spiritually bankrupt as the corporate forces arrayed against us. All infrastructures we build, like the monasteries in the Middle Ages, should seek to keep alive the intellectual and artistic traditions that make a civil society, humanism and the common good possible. Access to parcels of agricultural land will be paramount. We will have to grasp, as the medieval monks did, that we cannot alter the larger culture around us, at least in the short term, but we may be able to retain the moral codes and culture for generations beyond ours. *

(See here for another good Hedges post – this on the bankruptcy of traditional media: “The symbiotic relationship between the press and the power elite worked for nearly a century. It worked as long as our power elite, no matter how ruthless or insensitive, was competent. But once our power elite became incompetent and morally bankrupt, the press, along with the power elite, lost its final vestige of credibility. The press became, as seen in the Iraq war and the aftermath of the financial upheavals, a class of courtiers. The press, which has always written and spoken from presuppositions and principles that reflect the elite consensus, now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly artificial.”)

On a slightly brighter note, I’m reading Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids. Reviews on Amazon are, to put it mildly, mixed; at approximately 1/3 of the way in, I’m enjoying it, perhaps because I find any post-onset-of-climate-crisis future where we’ve managed to retain some cultural continuity comforting. Based on the mixed reaction, you may want to use your local library or, if you follow @bruces, he twote a link to a pirate copy. Lest you think Caryatids is all sweetness and light, both major characters we’ve been introduced to so far have lost most of their families to violence in the starvation, food riots, disease and chaos as the climate crisis ramped up..

Collapse links

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Something to cheer us all up on a Saturday morning. First up, Dmitri Orlov’s Social Collapse Best Practices (a talk to the Long Now Foundation – audio and video ava).

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and scaling down our needs.

Something that I don’t see discussed enough is what a severe downturn (or depression or collapse, as we run up the intensity scale) means for social order. The last big bust didn’t exactly bring out the best in a lot of people – I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect folks to just accept being dealt a bad hand in a crooked game (mmm – long pork!). I don’t read Salon much any more, but this article – We’re on the brink of disaster – caught my eye.

Take China. So far, the authorities have managed to control individual “mass incidents,” preventing them from coalescing into something larger. But in a country with a more than 2,000-year history of vast millenarian uprisings, the risk of such escalation has to be on the minds of every Chinese leader.

On Feb. 2, a top Chinese party official, Chen Xiwen, announced that, in the last few months of 2008 alone, a staggering 20 million migrant workers, who left rural areas for the country’s booming cities in recent years, had lost their jobs. Worse yet, they had little prospect of regaining them in 2009. If many of these workers return to the countryside, they may find nothing there either, not even land to work.

Under such circumstances, and with further millions likely to be shut out of coastal factories in the coming year, the prospect of mass unrest is high. No wonder the government announced a $585 billion stimulus plan aimed at generating rural employment and, at the same time, called on security forces to exercise discipline and restraint when dealing with protesters. Many analysts now believe that, as exports continue to dry up, rising unemployment could lead to nationwide strikes and protests that might overwhelm ordinary police capabilities and require full-scale intervention by the military (as occurred in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989).

And then there’s climate change. This New Scientist article talks about the implications of a 4°C rise in global average temperature.

If we use land, energy, food and water efficiently, our population has a chance of surviving – provided we have the time and willingness to adapt. “I’m optimistic that we can reduce catastrophic loss of life and reduce the most severe impacts,” says Peter Falloon, a climate impacts specialist at the Hadley Centre. “I think there’s enough knowledge now, and if it’s used sensibly we could adapt to the climate change that we’re already committed to for the next 30 or 40 years.”

This really would be survival, though, in a world that few would choose to live. Large chunks of Earth’s biodiversity would vanish because species won’t be able to adapt quickly enough to higher temperatures, lack of water, loss of ecosystems, or because starving humans had eaten them.

Things are not disconnected – it’s all interrelated. Assuming we haven’t already passed some climatological positive feedback tipping point, the current economic meltdown may moderate our output of greenhouse gasses. On the upheaval front – China, India, and Pakistan share borders and possess nukes. Pakistan is the loosest of cannons, but China has a long history of civil fun ‘n games (I believe it’s called ‘losing the mandate of heaven’). A Pakistan/India nuclear exchange would kill a lot of people and put a lot of dust in the air – what kind of feedback effects would a south Asia nuclear nightmare cause? If climate change continues, the Indian monsoon becomes unreliable and there’s instability to the north – what then?

I don’t know if it’s an American thing, or whether this goes on worldwide, but some folks rub their hands in eager anticipation of an impending apocalypse. Just so I’m clear – if you think a post-collapse landscape looks like a Frank Frazetta painting with you in a starring role – grow up. If statistics and experience are any guide, it looks like you (and me) face down in filthy stagnant water or curled up in a cold, damp corner with a high fever and bloody diarrhea.

Have a nice day!

Update – two other posts on the specifics:

A great article on Iceland – the whole financial mess writ small – Wall Street on the Tundra.

In reply to the Santellis of the world – the foreclosure mess in Cleveland. Yes, some people were incredibly irresponsible (see Irvine Housing Blog), but even in those cases it takes two to tango. Some lending practices, though, were just short of theft/fraud.

In other instances, mortgage brokers would cruise neighborhoods, looking for houses with old windows or a leaning porch, something that needed fixing. They would then offer to arrange financing to pay for repairs. Many of those deals were too good to be true, and interest rates ballooned after a short period of low payments. Suddenly burdened with debt, people began to lose homes they had owned free and clear.

As early as 2000, a handful of public officials led by the county treasurer, Jim Rokakis, went to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland and pleaded with it to take some action. In 2002, the city passed an ordinance meant to discourage predatory lending by, among other things, requiring prospective borrowers to get premortgage counseling. In response, the banking industry threatened to stop making loans in the city and then lobbied state legislators to prohibit cities in Ohio from imposing local antipredatory lending laws.

The first thing we do, let's…

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…and the bankers and the talking heads. Via TPM comes this truly appalling clip of Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb on CNBC. Roubini and Taleb are talking about a systemic crisis and the needle that they think we need to thread to get through it; in contrast the network talking hairstyles want stock tips. I suppose it’s progress that the traditional media are talking to folks that actually got it right, rather than their usual practice of canonizing those who dug the hole we find ourselves in (obviously – given the title of the post – I’d prefer cannonizing them). I’m beginning to believe that a piece of the institutional failure we’re seeing can be attributed to our ruling elite’s love of going meta – don’t pay attention to the content of the argument, instead, warn your guests about the dangers of being a rock star and marvel that Bill Gates would actually wait in a line to hear your guests speak. The rage in the hinterlands may be breaking through the Villager’s (DFH-speak for the elites) carefully constructed bubble; Diane Rehm – usually the Villager-est of softball, conventional wisdom interviewers – was amazed at the platitudes spewed by her banking industry guests yesterday (check out that guest lineup though – now those are some wild and radical gets *sarcasm*).

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Rather than stock tips, what might actually be useful are some thoughts on the future of unemployment. Somebody twittered this link – whoever it was – thanks.

Start with the numbers: worldwide, the UN estimates as many as 51 million people could become unemployed this year. Here in Britain, if the analysts are right, one million people who currently have jobs won’t do in twelve months’ time. What happens next for those people will shape the kind of society we live in, over the next decade and beyond.

I want to think about some of the ways this situation could play out. In particular, I’m interested in whether the things we’ve learned from social media over the last few years can play a role in lessening the hardship of this recession and shaping the world which comes out the other side. *

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Finally, a blog that’s going on the blogroll real soon now – Boone, Johnson and Kwak’s Baseline Scenario.

The Baseline Scenario is dedicated to explaining some of the key issues in the global economy and developing concrete policy proposals. Since it was launched in September 2008, articles on this blog have been cited by The Wall Street Journal (Real Time Economics), The Economist (Free Exchange), The Financial Times, NPR (Planet Money), and many other sites around the Internet. The authors of the blog have also published articles in The Washington Post and in the online editions of The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, and Reuters. The blog was the subject of an interview with Simon Johnson in The Wall Street Journal. Content from The Baseline Scenario is currently republished by Seeking Alpha, Talking Points Memo Cafe, and RGE Monitor. *

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You’ll know I’m really pessimistic when I start posting recipes for long pork.

The future – here, but not widely distributed

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Three quick forward-looking links.

Crooked Timber is doing a Charlie Stross book event.

A New Year, a new Crooked Timber book event. But instead of one book, we’re covering a dozen or so, all written by Charlie Stross, exploring different forms of the SF genre from postcyberpunk to alternate history and beyond. For this we need an all star cast, and, in addition to several CT regulars (Henry, both Johns and Maria), we have contributions from Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and Ken MacLeod. Between us, we’ve managed to cover nearly everything. Glaring exceptions include the Laundry series, which every fan of Len Deighton and HP Lovecraft should read, and Glasshouse. I’ve added an open thread at the end of the seminar, for those who want to discuss what we missed.

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Geoff Manaugh is getting close on the BLDGBLOG book.  Close enough, in fact, that he’s posted some Wordle word clouds – looks like it’s going to be an interesting read.

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At City of Sound, The Personal Well-Tempered Environment.

SUMMARY

  • A real-time dashboard for buildings, neighbourhoods, and the city, focused on conveying the energy flow in and out of spaces, centred around the behaviour of individuals and groups within buildings.
  • A form of ‘BIM 2.0’ that gives users of buildings both the real-time and longitudinal information they need to change their behaviour and thus use buildings, and energy, more effectively. An ongoing post-occupancy evaluation for the building, the neighbourhood and the city.
  • A software service layer for connecting things together within and across buildings.
  • As information increasingly becomes thought of a material within building, it makes sense to consider it holistically as part of the built fabric, as glass, steel, ETFE etc.