tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-144344372024-03-23T12:15:18.041-06:00Status Quo Must GO"In a world that has begun to believe that financial profit is the only religion, sometimes not wanting money is more frightening to capitalist society than acts of terrorism."
Arundhati RayMBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.comBlogger1040125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-64965335257151336642017-07-10T19:32:00.000-06:002017-07-10T19:32:12.636-06:00The Uninhabitable Earth<div class="lede-feature-title-teaser" data-editable="headlines">
<h1 class="lede-feature-title">
</h1>
<div class="lede-feature-teaser">
<i>Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think.</i></div>
</div>
<span class="lede-feature-authors" data-editable="authors"><span>By </span>
<span itemprop="author" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"><a class="lede-feature-author-link" href="http://nymag.com/author/David%20Wallace-Wells/" rel="author">
<span class="lede-feature-author">David Wallace-Wells</span></a></span></span> <br />
<br />
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html<br />
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4u7d0jf00003d5sos6g6fwi@published">
<strong>I. </strong>‘Doomsday’
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4u7eljc00013d5sfa4zjp63@published" data-word-count="4">
<em>Peering beyond scientific reticence.</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4bf00003d5swvuzdtov@published" data-word-count="99">
It
is, I promise, worse than you think. If your anxiety about global
warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely
scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the
lifetime of a teenager today. And yet the swelling seas — and the cities
they will drown — have so dominated the picture of global warming, and
so overwhelmed our capacity for climate panic, that they have occluded
our perception of other threats, many much closer at hand. Rising oceans
are bad, in fact very bad; but fleeing the coastline will not be
enough.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4ci00013d5st3d7wbv6@published" data-word-count="36">
Indeed,
absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their
lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable,
and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this
century.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4hg00073d5svxtewmht@published" data-word-count="76">
Even
when we train our eyes on climate change, we are unable to comprehend
its scope. This past winter, a string of days 60 and 70 degrees warmer
than normal baked the North Pole, melting the permafrost that encased
Norway’s Svalbard seed vault — a global food bank nicknamed “Doomsday,”
designed to ensure that our agriculture survives any catastrophe, and
which appeared to have been flooded by climate change less than ten
years after being built.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4h500043d5s6gh6sw15@published" data-word-count="176">
The
Doomsday vault is fine, for now: The structure has been secured and the
seeds are safe. But treating the episode as a parable of impending
flooding missed the more important news. Until recently, permafrost was
not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name
suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen. But Arctic
permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much
as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere. When it thaws and
is released, that carbon may evaporate as methane, which is 34 times as
powerful a greenhouse-gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged
on the timescale of a century; when judged on the timescale of two
decades, it is 86 times as powerful. In other words, we have, trapped in
Arctic permafrost, twice as much carbon as is currently wrecking the
atmosphere of the planet, all of it scheduled to be released at a date
that keeps getting moved up, partially in the form of a gas that
multiplies its warming power 86 times over.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4gp00033d5sjh309o5u@published" data-word-count="99">
Maybe you know that already — there are alarming stories every day, like last month’s satellite data <a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998">showing </a>the
globe warming, since 1998, more than twice as fast as scientists had
thought. Or the news from Antarctica this past May, when a <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/antarctica-ice-shelf-larsen-c-crack-grown-618676">crack </a>in
an ice shelf grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going; the break now
has just three miles to go — by the time you read this, it may already
have met the open water, where it will drop into the sea one of the
biggest icebergs ever, a process known poetically as “calving.”</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4ge00023d5sm4dr64xv@published" data-word-count="272">
But
no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough.
Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie
movies and <a href="http://www.vulture.com/2016/07/the-present-worse-than-fictional-dystopias.html"><em>Mad Max</em> dystopias</a>,
perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet
when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer
from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are
many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the
climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper
chastising scientists for editing their own observations so
conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat
really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of
technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing
culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; the
way that climate denialism has made scientists even more cautious in
offering speculative warnings; the simple speed of change and, also, its
slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from
decades past; our uncertainty about uncertainty, which the climate
writer Naomi Oreskes in particular has suggested stops us from preparing
as though anything worse than a median outcome were even possible; the
way we assume climate change will hit hardest elsewhere, not everywhere;
the smallness (two degrees) and largeness (1.8 trillion tons) and
abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers; the discomfort of
considering a problem that is very difficult, if not impossible, to
solve; the altogether incomprehensible scale of that problem, which
amounts to the prospect of our own annihilation; simple fear. But
aversion arising from fear is a form of denial, too.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4hc00063d5s95teh31j@published" data-word-count="126">
In
between scientific reticence and science fiction is science itself.
This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with
climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds
of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is
not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be
determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human
response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where
the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all
of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the
devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those
scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they
are our schedule.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4ha00053d5sdpntb4mq@published" data-word-count="285">
The
present tense of climate change — the destruction we’ve already baked
into our future — is horrifying enough. Most people talk as if Miami and
Bangladesh still have a chance of surviving; most of the scientists I
spoke with assume we’ll lose them within the century, even if we stop
burning fossil fuel in the next decade. Two degrees of warming used to
be considered the threshold of catastrophe: tens of millions of climate
refugees unleashed upon an unprepared world. Now two degrees is our
goal, per the Paris climate accords, and experts give us only slim odds
of hitting it. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues
serial reports, often called the “gold standard” of climate research;
the most recent one projects us to hit four degrees of warming by the
beginning of the next century, should we stay the present course. But
that’s just a median projection. The upper end of the probability curve
runs as high as eight degrees — and the authors still haven’t figured
out how to deal with that permafrost melt. The IPCC reports also don’t
fully account for the albedo effect (less ice means less reflected and
more absorbed sunlight, hence more warming); more cloud cover (which
traps heat); or the dieback of forests and other flora (which extract
carbon from the atmosphere). Each of these promises to accelerate
warming, and the geological record shows that temperature can shift as
much as ten degrees or more in a single decade. The last time the planet
was even four degrees warmer, Peter Brannen points out in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ends-World-Apocalypses-Understand-Extinctions/dp/0062364804"><em>The Ends of the World</em></a>, his new history of the planet’s major extinction events, the oceans were hundreds of feet higher.*</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4l500083d5s6eggor60@published" data-word-count="280">
The
Earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are
living through now, each so complete a slate-wiping of the evolutionary
record it functioned as a resetting of the planetary clock, and many
climate scientists will tell you they are the best analog for the
ecological future we are diving headlong into. Unless you are a
teenager, you probably read in your high-school textbooks that these
extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that
killed the dinosaurs were caused by climate change produced by
greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began
when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees, accelerated when that
warming triggered the release of methane in the Arctic, and ended with
97 percent of all life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to
the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at
least ten times faster. The rate is accelerating. This is what Stephen
Hawking had in mind when <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2017/05/02/tomorrows-world-returns-bbc-startling-warning-stephen-hawking/">he said</a>,
this spring, that the species needs to colonize other planets in the
next century to survive, and what drove Elon Musk, last month, to <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-mars-spacex-martian-city-625994">unveil </a>his
plans to build a Mars habitat in 40 to 100 years. These are
nonspecialists, of course, and probably as inclined to irrational panic
as you or I. But the many sober-minded scientists I interviewed over the
past several months — the most credentialed and tenured in the field,
few of them inclined to alarmism and many advisers to the IPCC who
nevertheless criticize its conservatism — have quietly reached an
apocalyptic conclusion, too: No plausible program of emissions
reductions alone can prevent climate disaster.</div>
<aside class="related-stories" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/related-stories/instances/cj4wvd4x200063j5saop1ewar@published"><br /></aside>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5ch000m3d5szxpq9deq@published" data-word-count="172">
Over the past few decades, the term <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/06/anthropocene-debate.html">“Anthropocene” has climbed out of academic discourse and into the popular imagination</a>
— a name given to the geologic era we live in now, and a way to signal
that it is a new era, defined on the wall chart of deep history by human
intervention. One problem with the term is that it implies a conquest
of nature (and even echoes the biblical “dominion”). And however
sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged
the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely
to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering
first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go
to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is
what Wallace Smith Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer who coined the
term “global warming,” means when he calls the planet an “angry beast.”
You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.</div>
<div class="divider-short" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/divider-short/instances/cj4viyblq00002c5ns5glvulr@published">
</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4viyira00022c5n0rugba1x@published">
II. Heat Death
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5da000n3d5scaoehmr4@published" data-word-count="5">
<em>The bahraining of New York.</em></div>
<figure class="mediaplay-image horizontal " data-editable="inlinestuff" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/mediaplay-image/instances/cj4vjuvqd00073d5sr2wl0quf@published" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject">
<div class="image-wrapper">
<img alt="Image" class="img-data" data-content-img="" height="266" itemprop="contentUrl" src="https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/06/magazine/07-climate-change-1.w710.h473.jpg" width="400" />
</div>
<figcaption class="mediaplay-image-figcaption" itemprop="caption">
<span class="caption">In the sugarcane region of El
Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the population has chronic kidney
disease, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they
were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago.</span>
<span class="buffer"></span>
<cite class="credit">Photo: Heartless Machine</cite>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5db000o3d5seo7xz7wz@published" data-word-count="124">
Humans,
like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to
continually cool off, like panting dogs. For that, the temperature needs
to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing
heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of
warming, that would become impossible for large portions of the planet’s
equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the
problem; in the jungles of Costa Rica, for instance, where humidity
routinely tops 90 percent, simply moving around outside when it’s over
105 degrees Fahrenheit would be lethal. And the effect would be fast:
Within a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both
inside and out.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4m5000a3d5sjkitw7d2@published" data-word-count="185">
Climate-change
skeptics point out that the planet has warmed and cooled many times
before, but the climate window that has allowed for human life is very
narrow, even by the standards of planetary history. At 11 or 12 degrees
of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today,
would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot
this century, though models of unabated emissions do bring us that far
eventually. This century, and especially in the tropics, the pain points
will pinch much more quickly even than an increase of seven degrees.
The key factor is something called wet-bulb temperature, which is a term
of measurement as home-laboratory-kit as it sounds: the heat registered
on a thermometer wrapped in a damp sock as it’s swung around in the air
(since the moisture evaporates from a sock more quickly in dry air,
this single number reflects both heat and humidity). At present, most
regions reach a wet-bulb maximum of 26 or 27 degrees Celsius; the true
red line for habitability is 35 degrees. What is called heat stress
comes much sooner.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4pn000b3d5smlpkbk45@published" data-word-count="365">
Actually,
we’re about there already. Since 1980, the planet has experienced a
50-fold increase in the number of places experiencing dangerous or
extreme heat; a bigger increase is to come. The five warmest summers in
Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002, and soon, the IPCC
warns, simply being outdoors that time of year will be unhealthy for
much of the globe. Even if we meet the Paris goals of two degrees
warming, cities like Karachi and Kolkata will become close to
uninhabitable, annually encountering deadly heat waves like those that
crippled them in 2015. At four degrees, the deadly European heat wave of
2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be a normal
summer. At six, according to an assessment focused only on effects
within the U.S. from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the
lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the country east of the
Rockies would be under more heat stress than anyone, anywhere, in the
world today. As Joseph Romm has put it in his authoritative primer <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Climate-Change-Everyone-Needs-Know%C2%AE/dp/0190250178"><em>Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know</em></a><em>,</em>
heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain,
one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would
induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.” The high-end IPCC
estimate, remember, is two degrees warmer still. By the end of the
century, the World Bank has estimated, the coolest months in tropical
South America, Africa, and the Pacific are likely to be warmer than the
warmest months at the end of the 20th century. Air-conditioning can help
but will ultimately only add to the carbon problem; plus, the
climate-controlled malls of the Arab emirates aside, it is not remotely
plausible to wholesale air-condition all the hottest parts of the world,
many of them also the poorest. And indeed, the crisis will be most
dramatic across the Middle East and Persian Gulf, where in 2015 the heat
index registered temperatures as high as 163 degrees Fahrenheit. As
soon as several decades from now, the hajj will become physically
impossible for the 2 million Muslims who make the pilgrimage each year.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4xw000h3d5sqezbpycx@published" data-word-count="125">
It
is not just the hajj, and it is not just Mecca; heat is already killing
us. In the sugarcane region of El Salvador, as much as one-fifth of the
population has chronic kidney disease, including over a quarter of the
men, the presumed result of dehydration from working the fields they
were able to comfortably harvest as recently as two decades ago. With
dialysis, which is expensive, those with kidney failure can expect to
live five years; without it, life expectancy is in the weeks. Of course,
heat stress promises to pummel us in places other than our kidneys,
too. As I type that sentence, in the California desert in mid-June, it
is 121 degrees outside my door. It is not a record high.</div>
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</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vj0lkd00092c5neud10wmn@published">
<strong>III. The End of Food</strong>
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4t3000d3d5swfljp7ib@published" data-word-count="6">
<em>Praying for cornfields in the tundra.</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4tp000e3d5snu0ynctv@published" data-word-count="109">
Climates
differ and plants vary, but the basic rule for staple cereal crops
grown at optimal temperature is that for every degree of warming, yields
decline by 10 percent. Some estimates run as high as 15 or even 17
percent. Which means that if the planet is five degrees warmer at the
end of the century, we may have as many as 50 percent more people to
feed and 50 percent less grain to give them. And proteins are worse: It
takes 16 calories of grain to produce just a single calorie of hamburger
meat, butchered from a cow that spent its life polluting the climate
with methane farts.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4wi000f3d5smx5jevya@published" data-word-count="131">
Pollyannaish
plant physiologists will point out that the cereal-crop math applies
only to those regions already at peak growing temperature, and they are
right <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">—</a> theoretically, a warmer climate will make
it easier to grow corn in Greenland. But as the pathbreaking work by
Rosamond Naylor and David Battisti has shown, the tropics are already
too hot to efficiently grow grain, and those places where grain is
produced today are already at optimal growing temperature — which means
even a small warming will push them down the slope of declining
productivity. And you can’t easily move croplands north a few hundred
miles, because yields in places like remote Canada and Russia are
limited by the quality of soil there; it takes many centuries for the
planet to produce optimally fertile dirt.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq4xb000g3d5s9892bdlc@published" data-word-count="195">
Drought
might be an even bigger problem than heat, with some of the world’s
most arable land turning quickly to desert. Precipitation is notoriously
hard to model, yet predictions for later this century are basically
unanimous: unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today
produced. By 2080, without dramatic reductions in emissions, southern
Europe will be in permanent extreme drought, much worse than the
American dust bowl ever was. The same will be true in Iraq and Syria and
much of the rest of the Middle East; some of the most densely populated
parts of Australia, Africa, and South America; and the breadbasket
regions of China. None of these places, which today supply much of the
world’s food, will be reliable sources of any. As for the original dust
bowl: The droughts in the American plains and Southwest would not just
be worse than in the 1930s, a 2015 NASA study <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/press/2015/february/nasa-study-finds-carbon-emissions-could-dramatically-increase-risk-of-us">predicted</a>,
but worse than any droughts in a thousand years — and that includes
those that struck between 1100 and 1300, which “dried up all the rivers
East of the Sierra Nevada mountains” and may have been responsible for
the death of the Anasazi civilization.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq504000i3d5spzen255v@published" data-word-count="69">
Remember,
we do not live in a world without hunger as it is. Far from it: Most
estimates put the number of undernourished at 800 million globally. In
case you haven’t heard, this spring has already brought an unprecedented
quadruple famine to Africa and the Middle East; the U.N. has warned
that separate starvation events in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, and
Yemen could kill 20 million this year alone.</div>
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</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vj1m7g000e2c5njbuygqap@published">
<strong>IV. Climate Plagues</strong>
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5to00143d5s8f56falj@published" data-word-count="7">
<em>What happens when the bubonic ice melts?</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq53q000j3d5s1ht2jgco@published" data-word-count="114">
Rock,
in the right spot, is a record of planetary history, eras as long as
millions of years flattened by the forces of geological time into strata
with amplitudes of just inches, or just an inch, or even less. Ice
works that way, too, as a climate ledger, but it is also frozen history,
some of which can be reanimated when unfrozen. There are now, trapped
in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions
of years — in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter
them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight
back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq57w000k3d5suqsm3hg4@published" data-word-count="103">
The
Arctic also stores terrifying bugs from more recent times. In Alaska,
already, researchers have discovered remnants of the 1918 flu that
infected as many as 500 million and killed as many as 100 million —
about 5 percent of the world’s population and almost six times as many
as had died in the world war for which the pandemic served as a kind of
gruesome capstone. As the BBC <a href="http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170504-there-are-diseases-hidden-in-ice-and-they-are-waking-up">reported </a>in
May, scientists suspect smallpox and the bubonic plague are trapped in
Siberian ice, too — an abridged history of devastating human sickness,
left out like egg salad in the Arctic sun.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5by000l3d5sjuqx0zdf@published" data-word-count="121">
Experts
caution that many of these organisms won’t actually survive the thaw
and point to the fastidious lab conditions under which they have already
reanimated several of them — the 32,000-year-old “extremophile”
bacteria revived in 2005, an 8 million-year-old bug brought back to life
in 2007, the 3.5 million–year–old one a Russian scientist <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv0_Cu0FcPA">self-injected</a>
just out of curiosity — to suggest that those are necessary conditions
for the return of such ancient plagues. But already last year, a boy was
killed and 20 others infected by anthrax released when retreating
permafrost exposed the frozen carcass of a reindeer killed by the
bacteria at least 75 years earlier; 2,000 present-day reindeer were
infected, too, carrying and spreading the disease beyond the tundra.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5fp000p3d5s2oyty8k6@published" data-word-count="125">
What
concerns epidemiologists more than ancient diseases are existing
scourges relocated, rewired, or even re-evolved by warming. The first
effect is geographical. Before the early-modern period, when adventuring
sailboats accelerated the mixing of peoples and their bugs, human
provinciality was a guard against pandemic. Today, even with
globalization and the enormous intermingling of human populations, our
ecosystems are mostly stable, and this functions as another limit, but
global warming will scramble those ecosystems and help disease trespass
those limits as surely as Cortés did. You don’t worry much about dengue
or malaria if you are living in Maine or France. But as the tropics
creep northward and mosquitoes migrate with them, you will. You didn’t
much worry about Zika a couple of years ago, either.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5fz000q3d5srnx2pje8@published" data-word-count="125">
As it happens, <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/zika-virus-gmo-mosquitoes.html">Zika may also be a good model</a>
of the second worrying effect — disease mutation. One reason you hadn’t
heard about Zika until recently is that it had been trapped in Uganda;
another is that it did not, until recently, appear to cause birth
defects. Scientists still don’t entirely understand what happened, or
what they missed. But there are things we do know for sure about how
climate affects some diseases: Malaria, for instance, thrives in hotter
regions not just because the mosquitoes that carry it do, too, but
because for every degree increase in temperature, the parasite
reproduces ten times faster. Which is one reason that the World Bank
estimates that by 2050, 5.2 billion people will be reckoning with it.</div>
<div class="divider-short" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/divider-short/instances/cj4vj2dx7000h2c5nikhq9lf2@published">
</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vj2j8l000j2c5nz9mj7rvk@published">
<strong>V. Unbreathable Air</strong>
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5h2000r3d5scbkbiymx@published" data-word-count="7">
<em>A rolling death smog that suffocates millions.</em></div>
<figure class="mediaplay-image horizontal " data-editable="inlinestuff" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/mediaplay-image/instances/cj4vjwrev00093d5s10qd7p6b@published" itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject">
<div class="image-wrapper">
<img alt="Image" class="img-data" data-content-img="" height="266" itemprop="contentUrl" src="https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/06/magazine/07-climate-change-2.w710.h473.jpg" width="400" />
</div>
<figcaption class="mediaplay-image-figcaption" itemprop="caption">
<span class="caption">By the end of the century, the
coolest months in tropical South America, Africa, and the Pacific are
likely to be warmer than the warmest months at the end of the 20th
century.</span>
<span class="buffer"></span>
<cite class="credit">Photo: Heartless Machine</cite>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5jk000t3d5slhafu9vy@published" data-word-count="60">
Our
lungs need oxygen, but that is only a fraction of what we breathe. The
fraction of carbon dioxide is growing: It just crossed 400 parts per
million, and high-end estimates extrapolating from current trends
suggest it will hit 1,000 ppm by 2100. At that concentration, compared
to the air we breathe now, human cognitive ability declines by 21
percent.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5jw000u3d5sdcx7wajq@published" data-word-count="115">
Other
stuff in the hotter air is even scarier, with small increases in
pollution capable of shortening life spans by ten years. The warmer the
planet gets, the more ozone forms, and by mid-century, Americans will
likely suffer a 70 percent increase in unhealthy ozone smog, the
National Center for Atmospheric Research has projected. By 2090, as many
as 2 billion people globally will be breathing air above the WHO “safe”
level; one paper last month showed that, among other effects, a
pregnant mother’s exposure to ozone raises the child’s risk of autism
(as much as tenfold, combined with other environmental factors). Which
does make you think again about the autism epidemic in West Hollywood.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5kx000v3d5s7cart75l@published" data-word-count="199">
Already,
more than 10,000 people die each day from the small particles emitted
from fossil-fuel burning; each year, 339,000 people die from wildfire
smoke, in part because climate change has extended forest-fire season
(in the U.S., it’s increased by 78 days since 1970). By 2050, according
to the <a href="https://www.usda.gov/oce/climate_change/effects_2012/FS_Climate1114%20opt.pdf">U.S. Forest Service</a>,
wildfires will be twice as destructive as they are today; in some
places, the area burned could grow fivefold. What worries people even
more is the effect that would have on emissions, especially when the
fires ravage forests arising out of peat. Peatland fires in Indonesia in
1997, for instance, added to the global CO2 release by up to 40
percent, and more burning only means more warming only means more
burning. There is also the terrifying possibility that rain forests like
the Amazon, which in 2010 suffered its second “hundred-year drought” in
the space of five years, could dry out enough to become vulnerable to
these kinds of devastating, rolling forest fires — which would not only
expel enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but also shrink the
size of the forest. That is especially bad because the Amazon alone
provides 20 percent of our oxygen.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5ky000w3d5sj6krkm2s@published" data-word-count="132">
Then
there are the more familiar forms of pollution. In 2013, melting Arctic
ice remodeled Asian weather patterns, depriving industrial China of the
natural ventilation systems it had come to depend on, which blanketed
much of the country’s north in an unbreathable smog. Literally
unbreathable. A metric called the Air Quality Index categorizes the
risks and tops out at the 301-to-500 range, warning of “serious
aggravation of heart or lung disease and premature mortality in persons
with cardiopulmonary disease and the elderly” and, for all others,
“serious risk of respiratory effects”; at that level, “everyone should
avoid all outdoor exertion.” The Chinese “airpocalypse” of 2013 peaked
at what would have been an Air Quality Index of over 800. That year,
smog was responsible for a third of all deaths in the country.</div>
<div class="divider-short" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/divider-short/instances/cj4vj3pqu000m2c5nco8nz9us@published">
</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vj51w6000o2c5n5vzc9l19@published">
<strong>VI. Perpetual War</strong>
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5ns000x3d5s6jy5qcb6@published" data-word-count="5">
<em>The violence baked into heat.</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5p1000y3d5s9ilhbl9y@published" data-word-count="132">
Climatologists
are very careful when talking about Syria. They want you to know that
while climate change did produce a drought that contributed to civil
war, it is not exactly fair to saythat the conflict is the result of
warming; next door, for instance, Lebanon suffered the same crop
failures. But researchers like Marshall Burke and Solomon Hsiang have
managed to quantify some of the non-obvious relationships between
temperature and violence: For every half-degree of warming, they say,
societies will see between a 10 and 20 percent increase in the
likelihood of armed conflict. In climate science, nothing is simple, but
the arithmetic is harrowing: A planet five degrees warmer would have at
least half again as many wars as we do today. Overall, social conflict
could more than double this century.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5p8000z3d5s7h54y73q@published" data-word-count="108">
This
is one reason that, as nearly every climate scientist I spoke to
pointed out, the U.S. military is obsessed with climate change: The
drowning of all American Navy bases by sea-level rise is trouble enough,
but being the world’s policeman is quite a bit harder when the crime
rate doubles. Of course, it’s not just Syria where climate has
contributed to conflict. Some speculate that the elevated level of
strife across the Middle East over the past generation reflects the
pressures of global warming — a hypothesis all the more cruel
considering that warming began accelerating when the industrialized
world extracted and then burned the region’s oil.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5s800103d5sr1ue6zm9@published" data-word-count="117">
What
accounts for the relationship between climate and conflict? Some of it
comes down to agriculture and economics; a lot has to do with forced
migration, already at a record high, with at least 65 million displaced
people wandering the planet right now. But there is also the simple fact
of individual irritability. Heat increases municipal crime rates, and
swearing on social media, and the likelihood that a major-league
pitcher, coming to the mound after his teammate has been hit by a pitch,
will hit an opposing batter in retaliation. And the arrival of
air-conditioning in the developed world, in the middle of the past
century, did little to solve the problem of the summer crime wave.</div>
<div class="divider-short" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/divider-short/instances/cj4vj61gy000t2c5n5ogqafw6@published">
</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vj76s9000w2c5n84gxzgup@published">
VII. Permanent Economic Collapse
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5t800123d5s33ijy8ke@published" data-word-count="6">
<em>Dismal capitalism in a half-poorer world.</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5wj00153d5slnf31qo6@published" data-word-count="192">
The
murmuring mantra of global neoliberalism, which prevailed between the
end of the Cold War and the onset of the Great Recession, is that
economic growth would save us from anything and everything.<br />But in
the aftermath of the 2008 crash, a growing number of historians studying
what they call “fossil capitalism” have begun to suggest that the
entire history of swift economic growth, which began somewhat suddenly
in the 18th century, is not the result of innovation or trade or the
dynamics of global capitalism but simply our discovery of fossil fuels
and all their raw power — a onetime injection of new “value” into a
system that had previously been characterized by global subsistence
living. Before fossil fuels, nobody lived better than their parents or
grandparents or ancestors from 500 years before, except in the immediate
aftermath of a great plague like the Black Death, which allowed the
lucky survivors to gobble up the resources liberated by mass graves.
After we’ve burned all the fossil fuels, these scholars suggest, perhaps
we will return to a “steady state” global economy. Of course, that
onetime injection has a devastating long-term cost: climate change.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq640001d3d5sf7m2uksv@published" data-word-count="193">
The
most exciting research on the economics of warming has also come from
Hsiang and his colleagues, who are not historians of fossil capitalism
but who offer some very bleak analysis of their own: Every degree
Celsius of warming costs, on average, 1.2 percent of GDP (an enormous
number, considering we count growth in the low single digits as
“strong”). This is the sterling work in the field, and their median
projection is for a 23 percent loss in per capita earning globally by
the end of this century (resulting from changes in agriculture, crime,
storms, energy, mortality, and labor).<br />Tracing the shape of the
probability curve is even scarier: There is a 12 percent chance that
climate change will reduce global output by more than 50 percent by
2100, they say, and a 51 percent chance that it lowers per capita GDP by
20 percent or more by then, unless emissions decline. By comparison,
the Great Recession lowered global GDP by about 6 percent, in a onetime
shock; Hsiang and his colleagues estimate a one-in-eight chance of an
ongoing and irreversible effect by the end of the century that is eight
times worse.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5xr00163d5seqoa2qcv@published" data-word-count="118">
The
scale of that economic devastation is hard to comprehend, but you can
start by imagining what the world would look like today with an economy
half as big, which would produce only half as much value, generating
only half as much to offer the workers of the world. It makes the
grounding of flights out of heat-stricken Phoenix last month seem like
pathetically small economic potatoes. And, among other things, it makes
the idea of postponing government action on reducing emissions and
relying solely on growth and technology to solve the problem an absurd
business calculation.<br />Every round-trip ticket on flights from New York to London, keep in mind, costs the Arctic three more square meters of ice.</div>
<div class="divider-short" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/divider-short/instances/cj4vjgaf7000z2c5nz9i1qn6p@published">
</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vjgk9300112c5nz8hz24bo@published">
<strong>VIII. Poisoned Oceans</strong>
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq5y400183d5s5eawiuia@published" data-word-count="6">
<em>Sulfide burps off the skeleton coast.</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq61800193d5sit5gwkjr@published" data-word-count="97">
That
the sea will become a killer is a given. Barring a radical reduction of
emissions, we will see at least four feet of sea-level rise and
possibly ten by the end of the century. A third of the world’s major
cities are on the coast, not to mention its power plants, ports, navy
bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands, and rice-paddy
empires, and even those above ten feet will flood much more easily, and
much more regularly, if the water gets that high. At least 600 million
people live within ten meters of sea level today.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq62e001a3d5su4z5jhw8@published" data-word-count="195">
But
the drowning of those homelands is just the start. At present, more
than a third of the world’s carbon is sucked up by the oceans — thank
God, or else we’d have that much more warming already. But the result is
what’s called “ocean acidification,” which, on its own, may add a half a
degree to warming this century. It is also already burning through the
planet’s water basins — you may remember these as the place where life
arose in the first place. You have probably heard of “coral bleaching” —
that is, coral dying — which is very bad news, because reefs support as
much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion
people. Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too,
though scientists aren’t yet sure how to predict the effects on the
stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters,
oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when
the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans’ pH has over the past
generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq62s001b3d5ssjwrvioq@published" data-word-count="262">
That
isn’t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can
initiate a feedback loop in which underoxygenated waters breed different
kinds of microbes that turn the water still more “anoxic,” first in
deep ocean “dead zones,” then gradually up toward the surface. There,
the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating
bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. This process, in
which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping
out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico
and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea
along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the “Skeleton Coast.” The
name originally referred to the detritus of the whaling industry, but
today it’s more apt than ever. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that
evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it,
which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering
flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in
that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback
loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed
ocean ground to a halt — it’s the planet’s preferred gas for a natural
holocaust. Gradually, the ocean’s dead zones spread, killing off marine
species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years,
and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned
everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the
oceans recovered.</div>
<div class="divider-short" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/divider-short/instances/cj4vjjcj100013d5sv19e2faz@published">
</div>
<h2 class="clay-subheader" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-subheader/instances/cj4vjjjvv00033d5s9dfgd871@published">
<strong>IX. The Great Filter</strong>
</h2>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq66f001e3d5sfzky10yp@published" data-word-count="5">
<em>Our present eeriness cannot last.</em></div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq67t001f3d5s0k81vkma@published" data-word-count="167">
So why can’t we see it? In his recent book-length essay <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Great-Derangement-Climate-Unthinkable-Lectures/dp/022632303X"><em>The Great Derangement</em></a><em>,</em>
the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural
disaster haven’t become major subjects of contemporary fiction — why we
don’t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven’t yet
had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into
half-existence and names “the environmental uncanny.” “Consider, for
example, the stories that congeal around questions like, ‘Where were you
when the Berlin Wall fell?’ or ‘Where were you on 9/11?’ ” he writes.
“Will it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, ‘Where were you at
400 ppm?’ or ‘Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?’ ”
His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate
change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell
ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize
the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous
miasma of social fate.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq686001g3d5sm1b4ss1j@published" data-word-count="221">
Surely
this blindness will not last — the world we are about to inhabit will
not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth’s ecosystem will
boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them
“weather”: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes
and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate
events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest
hurricanes will come more often, and we’ll have to invent new
categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and
wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in
size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going
forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early
naturalists talked often about “deep time” — the perception they had,
contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the
profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what
the Victorian anthropologists identified as “dreamtime,” or
“everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal
Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time
past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You
can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the
sea — a feeling of history happening all at once.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq68d001h3d5sof1p8iol@published" data-word-count="248">
It
is. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic
debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and
now come due after several centuries — a helpful perspective, in a way,
since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century
England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than
half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its
entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since
the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in
the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the
brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial
world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My
father’s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news
of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that
followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American
industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the
desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks
before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother’s: born in 1945,
to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives
were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity
paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized
developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years,
unfiltered.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq69p001i3d5sopd24rjb@published" data-word-count="259">
Or
the scientists’. Some of the men who first identified a changing
climate (and given the generation, those who became famous were men) are
still alive; a few are even still working. Wally Broecker is 84 years
old and drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty observatory across the
Hudson every day from the Upper West Side. Like most of those who first
raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction
alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith
in carbon capture — untested technology to extract carbon dioxide from
the atmosphere, which Broecker estimates will cost at least several
trillion dollars — and various forms of “geoengineering,” the catchall
name for a variety of moon-shot technologies far-fetched enough that
many climate scientists prefer to regard them as dreams, or nightmares,
from science fiction. He is especially focused on what’s called the
aerosol approach — dispersing so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere
that when it converts to sulfuric acid, it will cloud a fifth of the
horizon and reflect back 2 percent of the sun’s rays, buying the planet
at least a little wiggle room, heat-wise. “Of course, that would make
our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain,”
he says. “But you have to look at the magnitude of the problem. You got
to watch that you don’t say the giant problem shouldn’t be solved
because the solution causes some smaller problems.” He won’t be around
to see that, he told me. “But in your lifetime …”</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq6c6001j3d5sshr6qdnx@published" data-word-count="173">
Jim
Hansen is another member of this godfather generation. Born in 1941, he
became a climatologist at the University of Iowa, developed the
groundbreaking “Zero Model” for projecting climate change, and later
became the head of climate research at NASA, only to leave under
pressure when, while still a federal employee, he filed a lawsuit
against the federal government charging inaction on warming (along the
way he got arrested a few times for protesting, too). The lawsuit, which
is brought by a collective called Our Children’s Trust and is often
described as “kids versus climate change,” is built on an appeal to the
equal-protection clause, namely, that in failing to take action on
warming, the government is violating it by imposing massive costs on
future generations; it is scheduled to be heard this winter in Oregon
district court. Hansen has recently given up on solving the climate
problem with a carbon tax, which had been his preferred approach, and
has set about calculating the total cost of extracting carbon from the
atmosphere instead.</div>
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Hansen
began his career studying Venus, which was once a very Earth-like
planet with plenty of life-supporting water before runaway climate
change rapidly transformed it into an arid and uninhabitable sphere
enveloped in an unbreathable gas; he switched to studying our planet by
30, wondering why he should be squinting across the solar system to
explore rapid environmental change when he could see it all around him
on the planet he was standing on. “When we wrote our first paper on
this, in 1981,” he told me, “I remember saying to one of my co-authors,
‘This is going to be very interesting. Sometime during our careers,
we’re going to see these things beginning to happen.’ ”</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq6dr001l3d5s27zola1g@published" data-word-count="188">
Several
of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution
to Fermi’s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then
why haven’t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer,
they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be
only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial
civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many
billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by
space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up
simply too fast to ever find one another. Peter Ward, a charismatic
paleontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet’s
mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the “Great
Filter”: “Civilizations rise, but there’s an environmental filter that
causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,” he told me.
“If you look at planet Earth, the filtering we’ve had in the past has
been in these mass extinctions.” The mass extinction we are now living
through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq6e6001m3d5sbs5tl3gl@published" data-word-count="71">
And
yet, improbably, Ward is an optimist. So are Broecker and Hansen and
many of the other scientists I spoke to. We have not developed much of a
religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or
give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation. But climate
scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall
radical warming, they say, because we must.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq6fj001n3d5s9w8u8fk3@published" data-word-count="270">
It
is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty,
and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for
global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive
to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris
goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are
still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land
use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will
need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much
carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet’s plants now do.
Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence
in the ingenuity of humans — a confidence perhaps bolstered by their
appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention,
too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched
in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction.
Now we’ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will
find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet
is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed
to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us — even those who
may be watching closely — from fully imagining the damage done already
to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we’ve made, they say,
we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is
simply unimaginable.</div>
<div class="clay-paragraph" data-editable="text" data-uri="nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/components/clay-paragraph/instances/cj4viq6hr001p3d5sq68lgymp@published" data-word-count="11">
<em>*This article appears in the July 10, 2017, issue of </em>New York <em>Magazine.</em></div>
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<em>*This article has been updated to clarify a reference to Peter Brannen’s </em>The Ends of the World<em>.</em></div>
MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-9180556035252219862015-02-17T13:11:00.001-07:002015-02-17T13:11:23.029-07:00Young City<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-79466173979475860412014-11-17T17:58:00.002-07:002014-11-17T17:58:39.607-07:00Drugs for Thought<b><a href="http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/why-do-so-many-people-do-drugs-instead-of-solving-for-root-causes/">Why Do So Many People Get Lost in Drugs Instead of Making a Life That You Don't Need to Escape From?</a></b>
<br /><br />
By Tim Hjersted<br />
Many of us, perhaps most of us, all do some form of drug. When our drug of choice isn’t marijuana it’s usually alcohol. And when it’s not either of those the national standard for our consumer society is, of course, shopping. More than likely it’s probably both or all of the above.
<br /><br />
"I believe, inherently, that the structures of society are driving us mad. Though most of us believe ourselves to be fairly well-adjusted, healthy individuals, we are all patients in the asylum together now."
<br /><br />
But for most in the West, shopping fills the void and thrills the would-be thrilled. Several research studies have revealed the similar effects shared by shopping and other drugs. When people go shopping, a brain chemical known as Dopamine is released into the body, the same chemical that’s released when people drink alcohol, sniff cocaine or fall in love. Dopamine acts on the brain’s reward center, and is what gives people a “shoppers high” when looking for new things to buy.
<br /><br />
I’ve experienced this subtle euphoria many times while standing in the checkout isle at that final moment of purchase. It reminds me of the quick-cut shots in Requiem For A Dream: pupils dilating, chemicals hitting the bloodstream, eyes dimming as the drug washes over the user. Not surprisingly, shopping provides a much more safe (though far more expensive) fix. Indeed, for the well-adjusted and law-abiding, shopping is one of America’s favorite past-times.
<br /><br />
Not to say buying things or smoking pot or drinking alcohol is bad in and of itself. They’re not. It’s our habit of getting addicted to them that’s cause for the question: why do we do drugs? Doesn’t matter if your personal drug is socially acceptable or not. Television, gambling, sex, video games, sports, eating, prescription drugs, work, Facebook, wealth accumulation, relationships – the point is that culturally, socially, very few of us are not addicted to something.
<br /><br />
If you want to be cynical you could say that what you’re addicted to is what makes you – you. Truthfully though, most people are addicted to the same things. From a social perspective, it’s what makes these addictions okay. It’s what makes them not seem like addictions.
<br /><br />
But why do so many people get addicted to things in the first place? The benefit of getting addicted to something is, in essence: escape. We get so narrowly and compulsively focused on something that we block out the rest of reality. Now, why would be want to insulate ourselves from reality so fully that our behavior is destructive to other aspects of our lives?
<br /><br />
I believe, inherently, that the structures of society are driving us mad. Though most of us believe ourselves to be fairly well-adjusted, healthy individuals, we are all patients in the asylum together now. Besides anthropologists, most of us don’t have the kind of broad cultural perspective necessary to see our society objectively. If a hunter-gatherer saw how we behave towards each other (at work, at school, in politics, with strangers), he’d think we’d all gone nuts. We lack the perspective to even question the sanity of things like banks, schools, bosses, employees, capitalist economics, and needing money in our society simply so we won’t starve. Modern life has become a frenzied, stressful, and overwhelming place. Our mental environment is polluted with advertisements and commercial intrusions of every kind.
<br /><br />
Most of us do not think there is a connection between the basic structure of our capitalist society and the increasing social and mental problems that we in the affluent West have become affected by. If you’re depressed, for example, the problem isn’t the environment that made you depressed. If you suddenly flip out and want to shoot up a school or fly a plane into a government building, the problem isn’t society. The problem is you. Fortunately, we have a capitalist solution for that, too, of course. It’s called Prozac. So please let us know when you’re back to enjoying the work-and-spend cycle like the rest of us. :)
<br /><br />
Now, beyond the more visible examples, there is a much more subtle neurosis at play here that affects all of us. To get a handle on this, I believe we need to seriously question the fundamental insecurity that is caused by needing to “get a job” simply to survive. It is the basis of our entire civilized paradigm. We’re kicked out on our own when we’re 18. Our parents do this as a sort of “tough love” – to build character, of course, though really it only causes the adolescent anxiety and insecurity. Regardless, they’re forced to get a low-paying job to pay rent every month, sucking away monthly income that never allows them to get ahead. They get in to debt so they can go to school (a requirement now to get any decent-paying job). After graduating, they’ll hopefully have good enough credit and be able to to make enough money to buy a house (which means more debt). A mortgage on a house usually won’t be paid off for twenty years, keeping them in debt to the banks for half of their adult lives. And all of this, all of this just so they can have a stable roof over their head – to fulfill the second most basic necessity in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
<br /><br />
One of the most endearing memes in our society is that if you just work hard enough, anyone can make it. But despite how many people work earnestly in this system, it’s still not enough. We get in to debt with the hopes of graduating college and getting a good job. We keep paying rents or mortgages, but millions of people still find themselves devastated by the loss of their home or their job or both.
<br /><br />
When you add it all up, I just have to ask what kind of psychological harm this is doing us. With all the anxiety, stress, isolation and insecurity that stems from this basic fact of civilized life, it is no wonder so many of us become addicted to one form of drug or another.
<br /><br />
So, here’s what I would really like to ask: would we feel the desire to use our drug of choice so much if the world was different? If there were fewer problems, both on a personal and global level, would we keep looking for happiness at the bottom of a bottle or in the halls of the shopping mall?
<br /><br />
If there were new mediums for our society to derive meaning and happiness, and less social oppressions conforming our lives into little boxes of paying rent and toilsome work – would we hold onto these drugs in our free time?
<br /><br />
It may not be easy to imagine a world so amazing that smoking a joint or having a drink would somehow lessen the experience. For a moment though, let me argue that if we were to live in communities with radically different social and cultural structures, many of us, though not all I think, would have far less desire to take these consumer opiates, or at least not as much. If you are high from the excitement of a more spontaneous, authentic life – pot, alcohol, consumerism, TV and all the rest do, truly, make you “stoned” and more numb in the long run to more genuine forms of happiness.
<br /><br />
Now, you might be saying, that’s great and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that we all have to work to live, the society around us is still mad and that’s not changing anytime soon. True. But here’s the problem: every time we use a synthetic or commercial means to produce a good time for us– whenever we want to relax or escape for a while– we give up the possibility of a radically more positive and saner future – if not for us, then for our grand kids. Beyond that, on simply a personal level, we are giving up the means to find happiness from within ourselves. If we chose not to watch TV, drink, or go shopping when we wanted to have fun, we would have to think of some other activity, like going biking, or going to the lake with friends, or drawing, or countless other activities that require our participation to create the experience. Whatever it is that we like to do, they would be activities that would rely on ourselves to find contentment and fun, and I think there is a certain worth in being able to create happiness independent of external forces. Substances that do most of the work of creating happiness for us create dependencies. Granted, it’s certainly a lot less work, but I don’t think these solutions are very healthy.
<br /><br />
It’s like when a person only feeds their body fast food. Because most fast food contains partially hydrogenated soybean oil, a fat that is synthetically manufactured and not found in nature, your body doesn’t know how to process the fat and convert it into energy. But if you eat fast food long enough your body will manage to process it, however inefficient, just the way we are learning to process the low-protein high-fat entertainment we take in everyday. Because it doesn’t really work that well, we just need more of it to satisfy us, more to find that moment of immersion. More infotainment, more intoxication, more personal Hollywood scandals, more absurd and violent TV shows, more shopping – more visual and physical stimulus.
<br /><br />
Amazingly, the way these partially hydrogenated fats work, they also block the processing of healthy fats, making us more dependent on the bad ones. We are reaching this crisis in society today: where real hearty forms of joy and happiness are becoming more and more scarce. The beauty and joy once appreciated and gained from connecting with nature, for example: getting out into the wilderness and enjoying the intrinsic quality of a local place is becoming a rare and misunderstood outlet to finding more joy in life.
<br /><br />
Kids today living in urban jungles are increasingly growing up without this fundamental connection. Nature is something “out there,” read about in textbooks and more and more seems boring and uninteresting in comparison to the frenetic entertainment of TV, video-games, and the cellphone-shopping mall life of today’s kids. Kids are fed a constant data-stream of media representations that are constantly addressing them, putting them at the center of attention. In the world of media representations, it’s all about You You You. Naturally, when a mediated child has their rare encounter with an umediated experience, out in the wilderness where nothing was created specifically for them, and things just are – the child may find themselves at a loss to know what to do with themselves. What’s the point of being out here again? The fun kids perceive they want to have nowadays is almost always commercialized, packaged, and purchased at a store.
<br /><br />
Of course, this is true for all of us grown-up kids as well. The myriad forms of entertainment produced for us has become remarkably proficient at its task. A glossy shine packages all of the promises that the consumer/work/spend paradigm offers. Billion dollar ad agencies and the brightest young minds straight out of school have meticulously studied the art and science of stimulating our desires. The older we get, the more natural this mad society becomes, and the more content we are with what it has to offer. Conditioned to accept this culture’s escape routes for long enough, it’s possible we wouldn’t even recognize a better life if we saw it. And if we could see it, I’m wondering if it would appear so alien to us that we would choose the comfortable and familiar over the less known, even though we secretly hate it. What if we have gone too far, and lived so long this way that we now identify with our addictive habits so much that we see them as a part of ourselves? Toxic as our culture may be to our health – with all its drugs and distractions – if these drugs have become our comforting friend, could we let them go?
<br /><br />
Ladies and gentlemen!: Has our bread become baked?
<br /><br />
Well, maybe. But if we were to wean ourselves from the fast-food opiates of our culture, I think it’s possible we could begin to discover new mediums for creating meaning in our lives, and possibly a source of joy that is far more valuable than any transient satisfaction.
<br /><br />
Now if we want to dream big, let’s dream big. In the future, I see a society where the basic needs of every human being are guaranteed: food, shelter, health care – cradle to grave security. I see a future without the need for toilsome work, without nation-states, without rulers and ruled, hierarchy or war. You think this sounds like a fantasy, but it is possible now. The problem is not technical, nor creative. It is a problem of cultural lag – of the outdated institutions and values of our time not being able to keep pace with technological advancement.
<br /><br />
But to realize this kind of future, however impossible – to imagine anything better than what we presently have – it means we must wake up to the problems that our generation must deal with.
<br /><br />
Part of the apathetic nature of our generation lies in our awareness of large problems and our in-action to do anything about them. Indeed, this behavior, this conflict of mental awareness and physical inaction is in large-part what creates apathy. When one has ideals but doesn’t live by them, it creates a subtle but long-term conflict of self, because it’s not authentic living. Apathy is a coping mechanism for this conflict. Either you have to take action or you have to stop caring. One has to happen for your inner psychology to not go nuts. To suppress that empathy and anger in the face of or awareness of oppression is usually the path of least resistance.
<br /><br />
Yes, if we do seek the other path, we will get angry. Yes, there will be difficulties and we will be face to face with the true injustices of the world as they exist today. But ultimately, this anger can be a good thing. If we can channel it into creating new systems of living and cultivating the positive values we believe in it will be a hell of a good thing. So trust your instincts. Tap into the feelings you have in your gut, because an amazing thing happens when you do start to take action – your cynicism dissolves. Suddenly, everything isn’t hopeless, and you realize we can change the world. Suddenly, you have the power to choose for yourself. We can do it if we just work on doing it.
<br /><br />
Now, let’s skip ahead a few years. You’ve gotten engaged. You’re reading alternative news. You’re involved in at least one local activist group and are working on projects that will affect change on multiple levels of society. You’re a damn awesome person! …in other words, and probably better in bed, too.
<br /><br />
But, there’s a danger here. After a while, drugs can pose another potential problem. When we get fired up to change things and have begun to do the work that it’s going to take to make it happen, the changes we seek will still not come to fruition for some time. The large paradigm-shifting change we envision may be more than a generation away. What we will experience until then will be many small, sometimes large, but often immediately intangible differences that won’t be noticed until they have begun to stack up.
<br /><br />
I noticed that after I had begun to do some of this work, it seemed like partaking in some of my old favorite hobbies was okay, now that it was accompanied by some more substance. I’d do the work, but a week later, many months later, now a couple years later, the big problems are still all there, so in the mean time it made sense to go out and party.
<br /><br />
The danger is, when going out to “find release” from our Monday morning problems, or our global-local problems, we risk depleting the energies we could otherwise give to solving the problem. We need energy to solve issues or think creatively, and partying like a rock-star will very well make us energized for the night, but likely burnt out in the morning.
<br /><br />
What is required for us to be successful is a sustained effort. Major powers have so far always won out because of their sheer momentum to keep on churning – it’s what led the hippie generation to burn out and finally pick up day jobs and it’s what has led the rave generation to become equally jaded and apathetic, among other sub-cultures.
<br /><br />
What was once a groundswell of potential creative energy and fresh thinking has again been diminished to what looked to be a passing fad of idealistic youngsters. Again, I think because we did not have the sustained, patient effort to turn our ideals into reality, and because these sub-cultures spent more time on drugs than working on solving root causes.
<br /><br />
By doing drugs, we have potentially committed a gigantic fraud upon ourselves. Like our parents of the last generation, we are close to subduing the vibrant and powerful spirit of our bodies to the point of quiet bickering, to complaining quietly until it may have almost found solace in the only mediums it has been offered. We may now have almost accepted small pleasures and transient moments of commercial entertainment as enough – as if this was all there ever was.
<br /><br />
Our generation, whether they subscribe to higher ideals or not, is quickly and dangerously reaching the point where it is enough to “just get by”: to get a job, watch movies, have sex and buy more stuff. We can leave these problems to someone else. Content with the barrage of entertainment that consumer culture has to offer, and overwhelmed by the daunting challenge our generation faces, there are enough distractions to keep us comfortably numb well after we’ve forgotten what real life is all about.
<br /><br />
Now, it’s true. Even eco-minded activists like to watch movies or get engrossed in the occasional videogame, go out for a few beers – whatever it is. It’s certainly fine to enjoy these things. It’s just important to keep these forms in balance with everything else in life.
<br /><br />
For me, activism, drawing, making music, dancing, biking, photography, culture jamming, writing and other creative arts are forms of enjoyment that will resonate with me long after the activity itself. And more specifically, these are cyclical activities that rise like a spiral towards some goal unnecessary to define. That is the problem for me with ingestible or entertainment drugs. They lead only back to themselves. Taking the drugs, finding the escape and release we find temporary solace. Then Monday morning comes; we turn on the TV, and we are confronted with the same problems. We have not grown wiser. We have not sought progress towards any alternative. The only recourse is another drug, to find oblivion once again the next weekend and do it all over again, week after week after week.
<br /><br />
This cycle is likely filled with inspirational moments, rousing declarative moments to change and wrestle away the bouts of apathy. The moment reading this may be another one. But affirmations are not useful by themselves. They must be followed by focused, practical action – action that reinforces our beliefs of who we are. To be aware of the traps that lead back to the same looping cycles is a good start. From there, we can choose what step we want to take next.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-64305751927921235462014-11-12T09:17:00.001-07:002014-11-12T09:17:34.484-07:00HustlersAlterNet / By Nomi Prins<br />
<br />
<b><a href="http://www.alternet.org/print/economy/why-american-empire-was-destined-collapse">Why the American Empire Was Destined to Collapse</a></b><br />
<br />
November 10, 2014<br />
<br />
Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis, the nation’s top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives, unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the American Dream.
<br />
<br />
This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well, game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw in the entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by definition be at someone else’s expense.
<br />
<br />
In Why America Failed [3], noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always. Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came down to a drive for "more" -- for individual accumulation of wealth.
<br />
<br />
So where does that leave us as a country? I caught up with Berman to find out.
<br />
<br />
Nomi Prins: Why America Failed is the third book in a trilogy you wrote on the decline of the American Empire. How did this trilogy evolve?
<br />
<br />
Morris Berman: The first book in the series, The Twilight of American Culture (2000), is a structural analysis, or internal comparison, of the contemporary US and the late Roman Empire. In it, I identified factors that were central to the fall of Rome and showed that they were present in the US today. I said that if we didn’t address these, we were doomed. I didn’t believe for a moment we would, of course, and now the results are obvious.
<br />
<br />
After 9/11, I realized that my comparison with Rome lacked one crucial component: like Rome, we were attacked from the outside. Dark Ages America (2006), the sequel to Twilight, is an analysis of US foreign policy and its relationship to domestic policy, once again arguing that there had to be a serious reevaluation of both if we were to arrest the disintegration of the nation. Of course, no such reevaluation took place, and we are now in huge economic trouble with no hope of recovery, and stuck in two wars in the Middle East that we cannot seem to win.
<br />
<br />
By the time I sat down to write the third volume, Why America Failed, I was past the point of issuing warnings. The book is basically a postmortem for a dying nation. The argument is that we failed for reasons that go back more than 400 years. As a result, the historical momentum to not undertake a reassessment, and just continue on with business as usual, is very powerful. At this point we can no more reverse our downward trajectory than we can turn around an aircraft carrier in a bathtub.
<br />
<br />
NP: So you’ve been analyzing America’s decline for over a decade. Was there a particular, specific inspiration for Why America Failed?
<br />
<br />
MB: I was originally inspired by the historian Walter McDougall (Freedom Just Around the Corner) and his argument about America being a nation of hustlers. The original working title was Capitalism and Its Discontents, the point being that those who dissented from the dominant ideology never had a chance. The crux of the problem remains the American Dream: even “progressives” see it as the solution -- including, I have the impression, the Wall Street protesters -- when it’s actually the problem.
<br />
<br />
In my essay collection, A Question of Values, I talk about how we are driven by a number of unconscious assumptions, including the notions of our being the “chosen people” and the availability of an endless frontier (once geographical, now economic and technological). For a while I had The Roots of American Failure as the title, but more to the point would be The Failure of American Roots -- for even our success was a failure, because it was purely material. This is really what the American Dream is about, in its essence, as Douglas Dowd argued years ago in The Twisted Dream.
<br />
<br />
There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a Native American scouting expedition that came across the starving members of the Donner Party in 1847, who were snowbound in the Sierra Nevadas and resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. The expedition, which had never seen white people before, observed the Donner Party from a distance, then returned to base camp to report what they had seen. The report consisted of four words: “They eat each other.” Frankly, if I could summarize the argument of Why America Failed in a single phrase, this would be it. Unless Occupy Wall Street (or some other sociopolitical movement) manages to turn things around in a fundamental way, “They ate each other” will be our epitaph.
<br />
<br />
I should add that Why America Failed is actually part of a lineage, following the path initially staked out by Richard Hofstadter, C. Vann Woodward and Louis Hartz. Between 1948 and 1955 they all argued something similar; I just updated the argument.
<br />
<br />
NP: What do you say to people who don’t believe America has failed; who may just see the country as going through a bad patch, so to speak? What evidence have you compiled for the argument that the United States has failed?
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MB: The major evidence is, of course, economic, and there is by now a slew of books showing that this time around recovery is not really possible and that we are going to be eclipsed by China or even Europe. These are books by very respected economists, I might add; and even a US Intelligence report of two yrs ago, “Global Trends 2025,” says pretty much the same thing, although it adds cultural and political decline into the mix. The statistics here are massive, but just consider a single one: in terms of collective wealth, the top 1 percent of the nation owns more than the bottom 90 percent. If we have a future, it’s that of a banana republic. And there will be no New Deal this time around to save us; just the opposite, in fact, as we are busy shredding any social safety net we once had.
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NP: How does this relate to the rise of the Tea Party, or the Occupy Wall Street movement?
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MB: Americans may be very vocal in claiming we’ll eventually recover, or that the US is still number-one, but I believe that on some level they know that this is whistling in the dark. They suspect their lives will get worse as time goes on, and that the lives of their children will be even worse than that. They feel the American Dream betrayed them, and this has left them bitter and resentful. The Wall Street protests are, as during the Depression, a demand for restoring the American Dream; for letting more people into it. The Tea Party seeks a solution in returning to original American principles of hustling, i.e. of a laissez-faire economy and society, in which the government plays an extremely small role. Thus they see Obama as a socialist, which is absurd; even FDR doesn’t fit that description. There are great differences between the two movements, of course, but both are grounded in a deep malaise, a fear that someone or something has absconded with America.
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NP: Most political analysts place the blame for our current situation on major institutions, whether it is Wall Street, Congress, the Bush or Obama administrations, and so on. You agree with them to a great extent, but you also seem to place a lot of emphasis on the American people themselves—on individual values and behavior. Why is that? How do you see that as a factor?
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MB: The dominant thinking on the left, I suppose, is some variety of a “false consciousness” argument, that the elite have pulled the wool over the eyes of the vast majority of the population, and once the latter realizes that they’ve been had, they’ll rebel, they’ll move the country in a populist or democratic socialist direction. The problem I have with this is the evident fact that most Americans want the American Dream, not a different way of life—a Mercedes-Benz, as Janis Joplin once put it. Endless material wealth based on individual striving is the American ideal, and the desire to change that paradigm is practically nonexistent. Even the poor buy into this, which is why John Steinbeck once remarked that they regard themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Hence I would argue that nations get the governments they deserve; that the wool is the eyes.
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In addition, all of the data over the last 20 years show that Americans are not very bright, and not even the bright ones are very bright—it’s not merely a question of IQ. A Marist poll released on July 4, 2011 showed that 42 percent of American adults are unaware that the U.S. declared its independence in 1776, and this figure increases to 69 percent for the under-30 age group. Twenty-five percent of Americans don’t know from which country the United States seceded. A poll taken in the Oklahoma public school system turned up the fact that 77 percent of the students didn’t know who George Washington was, and the Texas Board of Education recently voted to include a unit on Estee Lauder in the history curriculum, when they don’t have one on the first president. Nearly 30 percent of the American population thinks the sun revolves around the earth or is unsure of which revolves around which. Etc. etc. How can such a population grasp a structural analysis of American history or politics? They simply aren’t capable of it.
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NP: So, basically it’s only a matter of time before students are taking courses in the historical significance of Kim Kardashian? What are the deeper, structural obstacles, in your opinion, to the American public accepting your general argument?
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MB: It seems to me that it would involve a complete reversal of consciousness. I remember after the publication of the German edition of Dark Ages America, a major Berlin newspaper, the TAZ, or Tageszeitung, ran a review of the book called “Hopes of a Patriot.” One of the things the reviewer said was that America might be able to save itself if it decided to pay attention to its more serious critics. What would it take for most Americans to regard someone like myself as a patriot, and someone like Dick Cheney as a traitor? Or Ronald Reagan as a simpleton who did the country enormous damage, and Jimmy Carter as a visionary who was trying to rescue it? As I said, this is not a matter of intelligence as IQ, because in America even the bright are brainwashed—just check out the New York Times. It’s more of an “ontological” problem, if you will.
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Let me give you a concrete example. A friend of mine who is a dean at one of the nation’s major medical schools was very taken by my discussion of Joyce Appleby’s work, in my book Dark Ages America. He went out and bought her essay, "Capitalism and a New Social Order," in which she describes how the definition of “virtue” underwent a complete reversal in the 1790s—from putting your private interests aside for the sake of the greater good, to achieving individual material success in an opportunistic environment.
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As a dean, my friend interacts with faculty a lot, at department meetings, cocktail parties, or whatever. He took these opportunities to raise the topic of the rapid redefinition of virtue in colonial America, only to discover that within 30 seconds, the eyes of whomever he was talking to glazed over and they would change the subject. Tocqueville said it in 1831, and it is even more true today: Americans simply cannot tolerate, cannot even hear, fundamental critiques of America. IQ has very little to do with it. In an ontological sense, they simply cannot bear it. And if this is true for the “best and the brightest,” then what does this say for the rest of us?
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NP: What do you think can be done to reverse the situation? Is there any hope for the American Dream?
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MB: At this point, absolutely nothing can reverse the situation. If every American carries these values, then change would require a different people, a different country. In dialectical fashion, it is precisely those factors that made this nation materially great that are now working against us, and that thus need to be jettisoned. What we need now is a large-scale rejection of the American Dream, and an embracing of the alternative tradition I talk about in Why American Failed. These are the “hopes of a patriot,” and they are simply not going to be realized.
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NP: Can you mention briefly what some of those alternative traditions are ? You have a chapter that’s attracted some controversy regarding the Civil War – how does that relate?
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MB: As I mentioned earlier, the working title of the book was Capitalism and Its Discontents. The reason I liked it (for various reasons, my publisher didn’t) is that it does reflect the thesis of the book: that although there was always an alternative tradition to hustling, with one exception America never took it, and instead it marginalized those alternative voices. The exception was the antebellum South, which raises real questions as to the origins of the Civil War, which were not about slavery as a moral issue, no matter how much we like to believe that. As Robin Blackburn writes in his recent book, The American Crucible, antislavery ideas were far more about notions of progress than about ones of racial equality. That’s a whole other discussion, however, and I have it out in the book for an entire chapter.
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But the main narrative here is that from Captain John Smith and the Puritan divines through Thoreau and Emerson to Lewis Mumford and Vance Packard and John Kenneth Galbraith to Jimmy Carter, this tradition of capitalism’s discontents never really stood a chance. It never amounted to anything more than spiritual exhortation. Reaganomics, also known as “greedism,” was not born in 1981; more like 1584. The result is that for more than four centuries now, America has had one value system, and it is finally showing itself to be extremely lopsided and self-destructive. Our political and cultural system never let fresh air in; it squelched the alternatives as quaint or feeble-minded. Appearances to the contrary, this is what “democracy” always meant in America—the freedom to become rich. The alternative tradition, in the work of the figures mentioned above, sought to question the definition of “wealth.” If the dominant culture was following the template of “they eat each other,” the alternative tradition can be encapsulated in that famous line from John Ruskin: “There is no wealth but life.”
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NP: Speaking of wars, having just undergone Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration, and actually the Republican candidates as well, have begun to vilify China, and have amped up the volume regarding Iran. You talk about our need as a country to have an external enemy. In what way do you believe that need will manifest itself in any coming military actions?
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MB: I deal with this issue in A Question of Values. America was founded within a conceptual framework of being in opposition to something—the British and the Native Americans, to begin with—and it never abandoned that framework. It doesn’t really have a clear idea of what it is in a positive sense, and that has generated a kind of national neurosis. I mean, we were in real trouble when the Soviet Union collapsed; in terms of identity, we were completely adrift until the attacks of 9/11 (just think of how frivolous and meaningless the Clinton years were, in retrospect). War is our drug of choice, and without an enemy we enter a kind of nervous breakdown mode.
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Hence the saber rattling against Iran now, or the foolish decision to set up an army base in Australia to “watch” China. What bothers me is that we are doing all of this unconsciously, and we always have. Mr. Obama, like most of his predecessors, is little more than a marionette on strings (Mr. Carter being the only postwar exception to this pattern, in a number of significant ways). Once again, true intelligence is ontological, and as a nation, we are sorely lacking in that department.
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NP: But haven’t we heard all this before? After all, there is a long history of the so-called “declinist” argument, that the country is in permanent decline and has no future. Such books come and go; meanwhile, the country goes on. What makes your book, or books, different from previous assertions that “it’s all over”?
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MB: Decline takes time; an empire doesn’t come to an end on August 4, A.D. 476, at two in the afternoon. Similarly, declinist analysis also takes time: the books you are referring to form a continuous argument, from Andrew Hacker’s The End of the American Era in 1970 to George Modelski’s Long Cycles in World Politics in 1987 to Why America Failed in 2011. And there have been a good number of declinist works in between. These books are not wrong; rather, they are part of an ongoing recognition that the American experiment is finished. Even then, we can go back to before Professor Hacker to Richard Hofstadter (1948), who called the US a “democracy of cupidity”; or to C. Vann Woodward (1953), who wrote that we were probably doomed because we had put all of our eggs in one ideological basket, namely laissez-faire economics. During these years the country hasn’t just “gone on”; what it has done is progressively fallen apart, and these writers have made it their business to document the process.
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NP: Finally, you moved to Mexico a number of years ago. Is all this why? Do you ever see yourself coming back to America?
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MB: There are a lot of answers to that question, and yes, some of the reasons can be found in the above dialogue. You know, the air is really “thin” in the United States, because the value-system is one-dimensional. It’s basically about economic and technological expansion, not much else; the “else” exists at the margins, if it exists at all. I first discovered this when I traveled around Europe in my mid-20s. I saw that the citizens of those countries talked about lots of things, not just about material success. Money is of course important to the citizens of other countries, Mexico included, but it’s not necessarily the center of their lives.
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Here’s what the US lacks, which I believe Mexico has: community, friendship, appreciation of beauty, craftsmanship as opposed to obsessive technology, and—despite what you read in the American newspapers—huge graciousness; a large, beating heart. I never found very much of those things in the US; certainly, I never found much heart. American cities and suburbs have to be the most soulless places in the world. In a word, America has its priorities upside down, and after decades of living there, I was simply tired of being a stranger in a strange land. In A General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis and his colleagues conclude that happiness is achieved only by those who manage to escape the American value-system. Well, the easiest way to escape from that value-system, is to escape from America.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-68054419118493169492014-03-27T17:54:00.001-06:002014-03-27T17:55:39.837-06:00Moar Stuff 2014...just ramblingOkay okay so it's been four years since I've posted to this blog. With the advent of Facebook and Tumblr, there isn't really any need anymore...I get people that compliment me on the rubber Tumblr blog now than I do the Blogger one; to which I want to retort, "but you realize how much more work it is to actually create content on a blog than it is just to re-blog a picture, right? Be careful what you say, a**shole!"
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Just kidding. I'll take any compliments I can, anywhere anytime.
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So once again I'm thrown into a frenzy with my life the past six months. Most of you know that I've been happily with my partner Paul for almost four years now, had a bit of a tryst with sexy Anthony for six months last year additionally while travelling to Victoria and having some fun together with some others semi-regularly for the past six months or so too. Sue me, I'm horny!
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So, some of you also know that Paul hasn't been well for awhile. I went into this relationship knowing that he had the condition lymphedema in his left leg and had had it for six years before meeting me. It wasn't a show-stopper for me; I just find him so damn sexy and was ga-ga for him ever since Murad introduced him to me.
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We've been living together since (officially) May 2012 and I basically sold everything or put everything into storage that I had hauled out here from Calgary in 2009, so some of the stuff I only had for a couple years before getting rid of it again. Luckily most of it was second hand and I've managed to repurpose some of the stuff I bought new, but a lot of my stuff and some of the stuff I inherited from Murad has been in storage for almost two years now....what a stupid waste of money.
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I had had full intention to just let go of enough stuff to get rid of the high priced storage locker this winter, then the unthinkable happened...Paul started getting what looked like scabs on his lymphedemic leg which progressively got worse, until he was diagnosed with a angiosarcomic tumour on his lymphedemic leg in mid-December 2013. The doctors had high suspicion of what it was in late November however it wasn't official until December 23rd...nice Christmas present eh?
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Anyways, the surgeons decided a full left leg disarticulation was the only way to ensure the highest chances of survival for Paul, so on January 9, 2014 they amputed his leg left right to the hip socket.
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Those three weeks between December 23rd and January 9 were probably the worst and longest three weeks of my life...four years to the day that Murad died. It was a crazy couple of days, waiting for him in the Surgery Wing waiting room, waiting the days it took for him to get off the anesthetics. It was a terrible terrible situation and to have to face an obvious, visual, aggressive cancer tumour right in your face every day was one of the worst things I've ever had to deal with. Paul was an absolute wreck and initially wasn't on any painkillers so in addition to the pain neither of us was sleeping, trying to keep everything together, and basically having the worst Christmas imaginable.
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I was honestly relieved after January 9. Despite having to now life with an amputee partner, at least that fucking cancer was gone. The last three months have been recovery, stabilization, adjustment. Paul seems to be adjusting to his new reality fairly well. I am trying to keep us afloat financially; already saying goodbye to a chunk of my retirement plan to keep the mortgage paid...it's probably going to be at least another year before he works again. I've been busy with Rubbout the past month and feel bad that I haven't been focusing enough time on getting Paul's paperwork done; filing insurance claims, submitting tax credits to provincial and federal governments, gas tax credits, transit and transportation option applications, entertainment card options, amputee benefits, on and on and on...oh yeah, and now 2013 Income Tax is rearing its ugly head. I will get at that stuff soon enough, but now Paul is being asked to start chemotherapy and now that we're reading up a bit more on angiosarcoma, he is freaking out and figuring he's going to die within the next couple years and frankly freaking me the fuck out again.
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I typically have to go through a week of worst case scenario imagery in my head before getting a grip again and moving on. I do worry about him a lot and I pray (if that's the right word) that the chemotherapy isn't going to be overly horrible for him. He's been through enough already...I wish this would end but if you talk to anyone who has had cancer, it never really does end. I just feel exhausted just thinking about it. I can't even fathom losing another boyfriend. I can't even fathom having to go through another cancer situation again. I've told him I move forward with the belief that the cancer was all contained within the leg and none has made it into the rest of his body, and even if a few of the cancer cells did, the rest of his body has the immune system to keep the cancer at bay, something his leg didn't have a chance with.
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I've been handling things okay, I think. I know for a fact I've been channelling my stress and frustration into epic situations in the bedroom with our lovers or solo sessions, rubber or not. I haven't been particularly overboard with partying or drinking or anything and I try to involve Paul as much as he wants to get involved. We have a great relationship that way.
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I don't know where things are going or how much I'm going to have to sacrifice to help Paul get through this but I love my man and will stay with him as long as I'm needed. I know he appreciates it and I don't want anything in return though I do find I have to vent my frustrations on him sometimes which isn't good but he expects it from me so it's not that bad if he knows to expect it, perhaps? I am learning to be more careful what I say.
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I'm riding my bike every day, slowly getting back into running again, Rubbout 23 is going to be amazing, the summer is looking up so long as Paul is going to be okay. I'm going to Seattle with friends at Easter and Chicago for IML in May. Lovely.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-55584640010361549322013-03-06T13:35:00.002-07:002013-03-06T13:35:19.370-07:00Confessions of An Economic Hitmanfrom <i>Confessions of an Economic Hit Man</i> by John Perkins p xii<br /><br />
“Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also has a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.<br /><br />
“The concept is of course, erroneous. We know that in many countries economic growth benefits only a small portion of the population and may in fact result in increasingly desperate circumstances for the majority. This effect is reinforced by the corollary belief that the captains of industry who drive this system should enjoy a special status, a belief that is the root of many of our current problems and is perhaps also the reason why conspiracy theories abound. When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth's resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it.”
MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-29941929197078003502012-11-26T12:14:00.000-07:002012-11-26T12:14:12.422-07:00“I am a sick man…” – The Depravity of Collapseby <a href="http://kulturcritic.wordpress.com/posts/i-am-a-sick-man-the-depravity-of-collapse/">Sandy Kulturcritic</a><br />
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“I am a sick man… I am a wicked man.” So opens Dostoyevsky’s small literary offering, Notes From Underground. It is, in significant respects, a profound critique of modern rationality, our perverse preoccupation with self-interest, and the crisis currently facing our global community.
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In a world that is already bracing for cataclysmic failure, the political and military elites of the most advanced nations on earth are making a mad – that is to say, a sick and wicked – dash to the finish line. As world economies teeter on collapse, and more primitive polities fall prey to greedy and over-reaching imperial aggressors, the Western hegemony drives full speed ahead, hastening planetary failure through global looting and pillaging of any and all appropriately objectified ‘resources’– natural or human. It is a game of capture the flag like none the world has ever seen before.
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In the face of stark climatic disruption, urban-industrial-induced global warming, and run away resource depletion, the captains of Western industry and political economy are competing for the final bits of increasingly rare, but once plentiful earthly treasures. The visceral reactions of mother earth, along with the cries of indigenous populations, be damned! And commercializing our circumstance only exacerbates the real problem when, for example, the climate news blog ThinkProgress awards cover of the year to Bloomberg Businessweek for its Monday morning quarterbacking diagnosis that “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.” We all then dutifully salute, applaud, and go on our merry way living the high life. It is the same strategy exercised by all the new green companies now peopling our airwaves, including those clean-coal and other energy strategies touting safe ways of extending the parade.
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Let super storms wash away the continental shorelines, let tidal waves engulf our cities as well as the placid island holdouts, let fault lines cringe and crack against our drilling and horizontal fracking, let the indigenous and the poor vanish into the black-hole of rapacious commerce; as long as we civilized ones get our stuff! Let the glaciers melt, the oceans rise, homes disappear, and fires rage – so long as we have our way! There seems to be nothing to deflect us from the current path of planetary annihilation. In a world now peopled with purely profane ‘objects’ for manipulation and control, nothing sacred remains to be cherished except acquisitiveness. All is expendable in the incessant drive for progress and prosperity in the refined atmosphere of the elite first world.
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Yet, this project of constant advancement and the unrestrained expansion of our Western hegemony has become a farce – a fantastical caricature of itself. The clowns in business suits have taken control of the bus and are driving it straight into oblivion with all of us onboard. Why, even the latest “terrorist” plots are seeming rather farcical, like cartoon characters cobbled together by the hands of our own militaristic propaganda machine. Even an old and pathetic Osama, gunned down by a crew of professional military SEALS, was memorialized in a fantastic story told by one of the fools, and then sold as a book for self-enriching profit while the going was good. But what good does such a spectacle achieve? Of course we had to do it, because the only just alternative was unacceptable – get out of the Middle East. So, we kill, and we stay, and we kill some more so we can keep up our lifestyle with more oil, markets and commercial successes. A chicken in every pot has now become a McDonalds, a Subway, or a Cinnabon shop in every city and village across the globe, and armed drones to protect their profit margins and labor costs.
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Meanwhile, the mass of the industrialized West stands idly by, even cheering the militarists on, as the aggressive and apparently psychotic Israeli’s decimate the more traditional populations of Palestine, unwittingly accepting as purely objectified ‘collateral damage’ the lives of innocents. Yet, we continue to justify our own acts of aggression and death-dealing among the innocents in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere, while severely chastising the similar fate of innocents in Syria. Will the hypocrisy of this empire never cease? Our policies would be comical if they were not so very tragic. Somebody should consider placing Ms. Clinton and Mr. Obama together in a rubber-padded cell to contemplate the depth of their own depravity and inhumanity. Why not try members of the Israeli government for crimes against humanity… along with Obama, Clinton, Petraeus, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and the rest of the cadre? And we have not even touched on the crimes of the corporate elite, the 0.1%
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The dissimulation, the sickness, indeed, the wickedness of this charade – this race to the bottom – is as frightening as it is demonic; destructive to the earth and its diverse inhabitants, including ourselves. OK! So, we are lost in this labyrinth, my friends. And what are we to do? As Derrick Jensen once pronounced: taking shorter showers is not the solution. Nor is implementation of new salvific technologies. This will only serve to extend the reign of terror loosed by our Western curriculum. As long as the politics of salvation, the myth of infinite progress, and a futuristic vision of global expansion continue to permeate our souls, the endgame is already lost amidst the propaganda and the promises.
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The only “hope” is to hope-against-hope that the intellectual scaffolding and epistemological underpinning of the system will implode from greed-laden-overload and overly enlightened self-interest. I understand that my position may seem irrational, indeed inhuman from a certain majority perspective, but majority rule is not equivalent to egalitarian democracy. The irrationality and inhumanity of the system itself dictates that reason may only be the crutch enabling us to forge ahead blindly and happily into the future. On this view, un-reason may be a fundamental requirement to correcting our fatal and fateful course. But, of this, I am uncertain. Why? Because it is a fundamentally irrational position. And I, too, am Homo sapiens sapiens, a twice wise and hyper-rational animal.
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<blockquote>I am a sick man… I am a wicked man. I am an unpleasant man. I think my liver is diseased. However, I don’t know beans about my disease, and I am not sure what is bothering me. I don’t treat it and never have, though I respect medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, let’s say sufficiently so to respect medicine. (I am educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am.) No, I refuse to treat it out of spite. You probably will not understand that. Well, but I understand it. Of course I can’t explain to you just whom I am annoying in this case by my spite. I am perfectly well aware that I cannot “get even” with the doctors by not consulting them. I know better than anyone that I thereby injure only myself and no one else. But still, if I don’t treat it, its is out of spite. My liver is bad, well then — let it get even worse!</blockquote>
Dostoyevsky, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Underground-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/067973452X">Notes from Underground</a>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-11889069619295067542012-02-13T11:49:00.003-07:002012-02-13T22:37:06.842-07:00R.I.P. WhitneyI know everyone's consoling and opinionating, but Whitney Houston's death has hit me hard. All negativities, problems, tragedy, and criticisms aside, Whitney was one of my five divas (along with Madonna, Olivia, Sheena, and Kylie) who helped me cope through my challenging 80s and 90s until I came out of the closet, then remained steadfastly there belting out the amazing songs off <i>My Love Is Your Love</i> as I was coming out and testing the waters. So many memories, so many chills up my spine and big smiles whenever I felt her power. I grew up with you, and it pained me to see you struggle so much. I will miss your magic, Whitney, and the world has less shine to it now that you're gone. I hope you are at peace.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLOwLJLA7qUo3ufUefnfqWhvwHS29p51SHbFgKBa2hdw59ui62j7RCIi6leAFsdi3F3LmmVr1TK_GOnpSkRO_SDbLv_pz_MptQnF7luSkxRXQ8zsNsdEtKbGhbn_BUnCF2DCb/s1600/2012-02-12T012016Z_01_SIN105_RTRIDSP_3_USA-WHITNEYHOUSTON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="267" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoLOwLJLA7qUo3ufUefnfqWhvwHS29p51SHbFgKBa2hdw59ui62j7RCIi6leAFsdi3F3LmmVr1TK_GOnpSkRO_SDbLv_pz_MptQnF7luSkxRXQ8zsNsdEtKbGhbn_BUnCF2DCb/s400/2012-02-12T012016Z_01_SIN105_RTRIDSP_3_USA-WHITNEYHOUSTON.jpg" /></a></div>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-63408175137117386672011-10-27T14:27:00.001-06:002011-10-27T14:27:15.985-06:00Born Rich<embed id=VideoPlayback src=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=7457140802142500840&hl=en&fs=true style=width:400px;height:326px allowFullScreen=true allowScriptAccess=always type=application/x-shockwave-flash> </embed>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-19402299301354864852011-10-03T13:10:00.002-06:002011-10-03T13:10:37.357-06:00The Occupation of Wall Street<b>Declaration of the Occupation of New York City</b><br />
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Posted on September 30, 2011 by <a href="http://nycga.cc/2011/09/30/declaration-of-the-occupation-of-new-york-city/">NYCGA</a><br />
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This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011<br />
Translations: French, Slovak, Spanish<br />
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As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.<br />
<br />
As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.<br />
<br />
They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.<br />
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.<br />
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.<br />
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.<br />
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.<br />
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.<br />
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.<br />
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.<br />
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.<br />
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.<br />
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.<br />
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.<br />
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.<br />
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.<br />
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.<br />
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.<br />
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.<br />
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.<br />
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.<br />
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.<br />
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *<br />
<br />
To the people of the world,<br />
<br />
We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.<br />
<br />
Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.<br />
<br />
To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.<br />
<br />
Join us and make your voices heard!<br />
<br />
*These grievances are not all-inclusive.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-4985283015682874892011-09-23T12:14:00.001-06:002011-09-23T12:33:05.232-06:00Disturbing...<iframe width="500" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/MZlDF9VCbrg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
“What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here?” Williams asked. “The mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?”<br />
<br />
“I think Americans understand justice,” Perry replied.<br />
<br />
I think Americans are clearly, in the vast majority of — of cases, supportive of capital punishment. When you have committed heinous crimes against our citizens — and it’s a state-by-state issue, but in the state of Texas, our citizens have made that decision, and they made it clear, and they don’t want you to commit those crimes against our citizens. And if you do, you will face the ultimate justice. <br />
<iframe width="500" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Xwoh6g05hj4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
Rick Santorum answered the question, and said that the repeal of the military’s ban on openly gay servicemembers was granting them special rights. From the debate transcript:<br />
<br />
I would say any type of sexual activity has no place in the military. The fact they are making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to and removing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell I think tries to inject social policy into the military. And the military’s job is to do one thing to defend our the military, wh I all-volunteer the ability to do so in a way that is [Inaudible] <br />
<br />
<font color="red">Holy crap. It seems all anyone in the Library heard was 'gay', not 'soldier'. No respect from any of the candidates for this particular individual serving in the American Armed Forces in the Middle East. Unbelievable.</font><br />
<iframe width="500" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/irx_QXsJiao" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
The last two Republican presidential debates have been some of the most macabre on record. Last time around, at the Reagan Library, the crowd gave the biggest applause of the night to the 234 executions that have occurred in Texas while Rick Perry was governor.<br />
<br />
In Tampa, Florida at the CNN/Tea Party Express debate Monday night, the tea party-filled audience literally cheered aloud for the uninsured to be allowed to die.<br />
<br />
The moment came during an exchange between moderator Wolf Blitzer and Ron Paul, whose libertarian views often make for good theater at Republican debates.<br />
<br />
Blitzer asked if under Paul’s libertarian philosophy, a sick man without insurance should be allowed to die in the hospital rather than have the state pay his medical bills. Before Paul could answer that question, shouts of “yes!” and cheering bubbled up from the audience.<br />
<br />
<font color="red">Who are these monsters in the crowds (and sometimes on the stage), seriously? Things are going bat-shit crazy south of the border...</font>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-86665303632044135522011-08-03T09:59:00.000-06:002011-08-03T09:59:27.660-06:0010 Things I Have LearnedTen Things I Have Learned<br />
www.miltonglaser.com<br />
Part of AIGA Talk in London<br />
November 22, 2001<br />
<br />
1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE.<br />
This is a curious rule and it took me a long time to learn because in fact at the beginning of my practice I felt the opposite. Professionalism required that you didn’t particularly like the people that you worked for or at least maintained an arms length relationship to them, which meant that I never had lunch with a client or saw them socially. Then some years ago I realised that the opposite was true. I discovered that all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client. And I am not talking about professionalism; I am talking about affection. I am talking about a client and you sharing some common ground. That in fact your view of life is someway congruent with the client, otherwise it is a bitter and hopeless struggle. <br />
<br />
<br />
2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB.<br />
<br />
One night I was sitting in my car outside Columbia University where my wife Shirley was studying Anthropology. While I was waiting I was listening to the radio and heard an interviewer ask ‘Now that you have reached 75 have you any advice for our audience about how to prepare for your old age?’ An irritated voice said ‘Why is everyone asking me about old age these days?’ I recognised the voice as John Cage. I am sure that many of you know who he was – the composer and philosopher who influenced people like Jasper Johns and Merce Cunningham as well as the music world in general. I knew him slightly and admired his contribution to our times. ‘You know, I do know how to prepare for old age’ he said. ‘Never have a job, because if you have a job someday someone will take it away from you and then you will be unprepared for your old age. For me, it has always been the same every since the age of 12. I wake up in the morning and I try to figure out how am I going to put bread on the table today? It is the same at 75, I wake up every morning and I think how am I going to put bread on the table today? I am exceedingly well prepared for my old age’ he said.<br />
<br />
3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.<br />
<br />
This is a subtext of number one. There was in the sixties a man named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life. <br />
<br />
4. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.<br />
<br />
Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything - not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.<br />
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.<br />
<br />
<br />
5. LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE.<br />
<br />
Being a child of modernism I have heard this mantra all my life. Less is more. One morning upon awakening I realised that it was total nonsense, it is an absurd proposition and also fairly meaningless. But it sounds great because it contains within it a paradox that is resistant to understanding. But it simply does not obtain when you think about the visual of the history of the world. If you look at a Persian rug, you cannot say that less is more because you realise that every part of that rug, every change of colour, every shift in form is absolutely essential for its aesthetic success. You cannot prove to me that a solid blue rug is in any way superior. That also goes for the work of Gaudi, Persian miniatures, art nouveau and everything else. However, I have an alternative to the proposition that I believe is more appropriate. ‘Just enough is more.’<br />
<br />
<br />
6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.<br />
<br />
I think this idea first occurred to me when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece. I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12 different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style. It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty. I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else. Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act. The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging to another moment in time. And there are sad stories such as the one about Cassandre, arguably the greatest graphic designer of the twentieth century, who couldn’t make a living at the end of his life and committed suicide.<br />
But the point is that anybody who is in this for the long haul has to decide how to respond to change in the zeitgeist. What is it that people now expect that they formerly didn’t want? And how to respond to that desire in a way that doesn’t change your sense of integrity and purpose.<br />
<br />
7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.<br />
<br />
The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch; perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know how - that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed. Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right. Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.<br />
<br />
8. DOUBT IS BETTER THAN CERTAINTY.<br />
<br />
Everyone always talks about confidence in believing what you do. I remember once going to a class in yoga where the teacher said that, spirituality speaking, if you believed that you had achieved enlightenment you have merely arrived at your limitation. I think that is also true in a practical sense. Deeply held beliefs of any kind prevent you from being open to experience, which is why I find all firmly held ideological positions questionable. It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being sceptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins. And then in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.<br />
Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad – the client, the audience and you. <br />
Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self-righteousness is often the enemy. Self-righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co-existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.<br />
<br />
<br />
9. ON AGING.<br />
<br />
Last year someone gave me a charming book by Roger Rosenblatt called ‘Ageing Gracefully’ I got it on my birthday. I did not appreciate the title at the time but it contains a series of rules for ageing gracefully. The first rule is the best. Rule number one is that ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ‘It doesn’t matter that what you think. Follow this rule and it will add decades to your life. It does not matter if you are late or early, if you are here or there, if you said it or didn’t say it, if you are clever or if you were stupid. If you were having a bad hair day or a no hair day or if your boss looks at you cockeyed or your boyfriend or girlfriend looks at you cockeyed, if you are cockeyed. If you don’t get that promotion or prize or house or if you do – it doesn’t matter.’ Wisdom at last. Then I heard a marvellous joke that seemed related to rule number 10. A butcher was opening his market one morning and as he did a rabbit popped his head through the door. The butcher was surprised when the rabbit inquired ‘Got any cabbage?’ The butcher said ‘This is a meat market – we sell meat, not vegetables.’ The rabbit hopped off. The next day the butcher is opening the shop and sure enough the rabbit pops his head round and says ‘You got any cabbage?’ The butcher now irritated says ‘Listen you little rodent I told you yesterday we sell meat, we do not sell vegetables and the next time you come here I am going to grab you by the throat and nail those floppy ears to the floor.’ The rabbit disappeared hastily and nothing happened for a week. Then one morning the rabbit popped his head around the corner and said ‘Got any nails?’ The butcher said ‘No.’ The rabbit said ‘Ok. Got any cabbage?’<br />
<br />
10. TELL THE TRUTH.<br />
<br />
The rabbit joke is relevant because it occurred to me that looking for a cabbage in a butcher’s shop might be like looking for ethics in the design field. It may not be the most obvious place to find either. It’s interesting to observe that in the new AIGA’s code of ethics there is a significant amount of useful information about appropriate behaviour towards clients and other designers, but not a word about a designer’s relationship to the public. We expect a butcher to sell us eatable meat and that he doesn’t misrepresent his wares. I remember reading that during the Stalin years in Russia that everything labelled veal was actually chicken. I can’t imagine what everything labelled chicken was. We can accept certain kinds of misrepresentation, such as fudging about the amount of fat in his hamburger but once a butcher knowingly sells us spoiled meat we go elsewhere. As a designer, do we have less responsibility to our public than a butcher? Everyone interested in licensing our field might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect the public not designers or clients. ‘Do no harm’ is an admonition to doctors concerning their relationship to their patients, not to their fellow practitioners or the drug companies. If we were licensed, telling the truth might become more central to what we do.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-34414765750504746902011-07-15T12:15:00.001-06:002011-07-15T12:15:04.679-06:00High To Low<a href="http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/infographic-tallest-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249/" mce_href="/infographic-tallest-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249/"> <img src="http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/images/stories/oap-landsea-oceans-100608-moderate.jpg" mce_src="/images/stories/oap-landsea-oceans-100608-moderate.jpg" alt="Our Amazing Planet explores Earth from its peaks to it mysterious depths." width="400" border="1" /></a><br />
Source <a href="http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/" mce_href="/mce_href">OurAmazingPlanet.com, Exploring the wonder and beauty of planet Earth through exclusive news, features and images.</a><br />
<font color="red">I'm amazed how small the liveable zone is amongst all that scale of tall and deep.</font>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-29802883989844350182011-05-27T10:25:00.002-06:002011-05-27T10:25:57.095-06:00Kylie Aphrodite North American Tour 2011 Playlist"The Carnival of the Animals" (Instrumental Introduction)<br />
"Aphrodite"<br />
"The One"<br />
"Wow"<br />
"Illusion"<br />
"I Believe in You"<br />
"Cupid Boy"<br />
"Spinning Around"<br />
"Get Outta My Way"<br />
"What Do I Have to Do?"<br />
"Everything Is Beautiful"<br />
"Slow"<br />
"Confide In Me"<br />
"Can’t Get You Out of My Head"<br />
"In My Arms"<br />
"Looking For an Angel"<br />
"There Must Be an Angel (Playing With My Heart)"<br />
"Love at First Sight" (contains elements of "Can't Beat The Feeling")<br />
"If You Don’t Love Me"<br />
"Better the Devil You Know"<br />
"Better Than Today"<br />
"Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love)"<br />
<br />
Encore<br />
<br />
"On a Night Like This"(contains elements of "Heaven")<br />
"All the Lovers"MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-27126087767534603092011-05-20T11:23:00.000-06:002011-05-20T11:23:55.963-06:00WTF?!?!It's a huge shallow pool, and there are definitely a lot of candidates to sift through without delving too deep into the parodies. There are a couple of parodies here (since there are some YouTube phenoms that have based their entire existence on gaying up hit songs) that are actually pretty good. And of course the gay porn stars trying to jump into a music career and the perennial gay faves like Ultra Nate. Enough flaming going on here to burn your body hair off.<br />
<br />
Here are a few of the gayest videos produced EVA.<br />
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23782776?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="470" height="349" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/23782776">WTF</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user7099595">Matt Zarley</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FKCNx_ynEHU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kZf-Ql3wayA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4dlYqPmK7uU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/2w02QxQZGQc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/_sjlPK0Snqo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kelUCEcdO8M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ko2IIvE34WY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br />
<iframe width="470" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FqlY03wp7b4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-75397365144514960782011-05-05T11:15:00.000-06:002011-05-05T11:15:50.940-06:00The problem is....- Christianity along with all other theistic belief systems is the fraud of the age. <br />
- It serves to detach the species from the natural world, and likewise each other. <br />
- It supports blind submission to authority. <br />
- It reduces human responsibility to the effect that ‘god’ controls everything and in turn, awful crimes and great successes can all be justified in the name of the divine pursuit. <br />
- most importantly, it empowers those who know the truth but use the myth to manipulate and control societies. <br />
- The religious myth is the most powerful device ever created, and basically serves as the psychological soil upon which other myths can flourish. <br />
- In the deeper sense, and the religious sense, a myth serves as an orienting and mobilizing story for the people. The focus is not on the stories relationship to reality, but on its function. A story cannot function unless it is believed to be true in the community or the nation. It is not a matter of debate, if some people have the bad taste to raise the question of the truth in the ‘sacred story’ the keepers of the faith do not enter into debate with them. They ignore them, or denounce them as blasphemous.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-59211111229177230912011-03-28T12:32:00.000-06:002011-03-28T12:32:25.255-06:00My thoughts exactlyI love this comment from <i>Clusterfuck Nation</i> this morning. It's how I feel, EXACTLY. The comments were made on the topic of James Howard Kunstler's review of Charles Ferguson's documentary, <i>Inside Job</i>.<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Jim, I tend to agree with you that our B-schools produce a lot of blinkered thinking:<br />
<br />
"shameless academic mandarins caught on camera trying to weasel out of their greed-driven misdeeds"<br />
<br />
On the other hand, last week I had lunch with a prominent academic economist. He shocked everyone at the table with his belief that our economic system, since long before the Crash, has been based on hallucinations and that the "recovery" is as fragile as a 100-year-old dowager with a bad cough.<br />
<br />
He did not sleep the week after the Japan catastrophe. He also believes that it will only take one such event to lead to a new and deeper Crash, including an American default. It does not make the papers, he noted, that the Fed is quietly buying back Chinese-held US debt so keep America from collapsing. China has lost faith in the idea that American debt is worth a thing, he claimed. We just don't know it yet.<br />
<br />
He says to watch two indicators: the value of the dollar vs. a market-basket of other currencies, and the price of oil, to see where the nation is going.<br />
<br />
And yes, he understands and accepts the premises of Peak Oil. Maybe we'll get a new breed of economists in a future who understand scarcity and help others understand it. If we have universities.<br />
<br />
Over lunch this guy stunned his listeners (but not me) by saying it's over, essentially. His students don't want to believe him when he tells them "the US will have to default on its debt. There is no way to repay it through either tax hikes or spending cuts. We are screwed."<br />
<br />
Those Millennials had best learn some 19th century skills and stop texting on their smart phones. <br />
<br />
I'll only disagree with you on one count: we may, in time, see Bernanke and his ilk less as cowards and shills and more as sad and doomed figures who knew the lumpenproletariat were not ready for the hard truth.<br />
<br />
I think these financial kingpins in government will be recalled, in whatever histories we write in 200 years, as desperate men who tried to prop up a doomed system, based upon promises and emptiness, that took them down with it.</blockquote>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-75269148336823674742011-03-07T18:02:00.002-07:002011-03-07T18:02:28.608-07:00Wolfgang Gartner....cool video<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UOuxTQpxawc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-57667502927533155412011-02-22T14:10:00.000-07:002011-02-22T14:10:34.619-07:0015 Styles of Distorted Thinking1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation. A single detail may be picked out, and the whole event becomes colored by this detail. When you pull negative things out of context, isolated from all the good experiences around you, you make them larger and more awful than they really are.<br />
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2. Polarized Thinking: The hallmark of this distortion is an insistence on dichotomous choices. Things are black or white, good or bad. You tend to perceive everything at the extremes, with very little room for a middle ground. The greatest danger in polarized thinking is its impact on how you judge yourself. For example-You have to be perfect or you're a failure.<br />
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3. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen over and over again. 'Always' and 'never' are cues that this style of thinking is being utilized. This distortion can lead to a restricted life, as you avoid future failures based on the single incident or event.<br />
<br />
4. Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you. Mind reading depends on a process called projection. You imagine that people feel the same way you do and react to things the same way you do. Therefore, you don't watch or listen carefully enough to notice that they are actually different. Mind readers jump to conclusions that are true for them, without checking whether they are true for the other person.<br />
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5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start "what if's." What if that happens to me? What if tragedy strikes? There are no limits to a really fertile catastrophic imagination. An underlying catalyst for this style of thinking is that you do not trust in yourself and your capacity to adapt to change.<br />
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6. Personalization: This is the tendency to relate everything around you to yourself. For example, thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who's smarter, better looking, etc. The underlying assumption is that your worth is in question. You are therefore continually forced to test your value as a person by measuring yourself against others. If you come out better, you get a moment's relief. If you come up short, you feel diminished. The basic thinking error is that you interpret each experience, each conversation, each look as a clue to your worth and value.<br />
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7. Control Fallacies: There are two ways you can distort your sense of power and control. If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you. Feeling externally controlled keeps you stuck. You don't believe you can really affect the basic shape of your life, let alone make any difference in the world. The truth of the matter is that we are constantly making decisions, and that every decision affects our lives. On the other hand, the fallacy of internal control leaves you exhausted as you attempt to fill the needs of everyone around you, and feel responsible in doing so (and guilty when you cannot).<br />
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8. Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair, but other people won't agree with you. Fairness is so conveniently defined, so temptingly self-serving, that each person gets locked into his or her own point of view. It is tempting to make assumptions about how things would change if people were only fair or really valued you. But the other person hardly ever sees it that way, and you end up causing yourself a lot of pain and an ever-growing resentment.<br />
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9. Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem. Blaming often involves making someone else responsible for choices and decisions that are actually our own responsibility. In blame systems, you deny your right (and responsibility) to assert your needs, say no, or go elsewhere for what you want.<br />
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10. Shoulds: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty if you violate the rules. The rules are right and indisputable and, as a result, you are often in the position of judging and finding fault (in yourself and in others). Cue words indicating the presence of this distortion are should, ought, and must.<br />
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11. Emotional Reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true-automatically. If you feel stupid or boring, then you must be stupid and boring. If you feel guilty, then you must have done something wrong. The problem with emotional reasoning is that our emotions interact and correlate with our thinking process. Therefore, if you have distorted thoughts and beliefs, your emotions will reflect these distortions.<br />
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12. Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You need to change people because your hopes for happiness seem to depend entirely on them. The truth is the only person you can really control or have much hope of changing is yourself. The underlying assumption of this thinking style is that your happiness depends on the actions of others. Your happiness actually depends on the thousands of large and small choices you make in your life.<br />
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13. Global Labeling: You generalize one or two qualities (in yourself or others) into a negative global judgment. Global labeling ignores all contrary evidence, creating a view of the world that can be stereotyped and one-dimensional. Labeling yourself can have a negative and insidious impact upon your self-esteem; while labeling others can lead to snap-judgments, relationship problems, and prejudice.<br />
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14. Being Right: You feel continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to demonstrate your rightness. Having to be 'right' often makes you hard of hearing. You aren't interested in the possible veracity of a differing opinion, only in defending your own. Being right becomes more important than an honest and caring relationship.<br />
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15. Heaven's Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You fell bitter when the reward doesn't come as expected. The problem is that while you are always doing the 'right thing,' if your heart really isn't in it, you are physically and emotionally depleting yourself.<br />
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*From <i>Thoughts & Feelings</i> by McKay, Davis, & Fanning. New Harbinger, 1981. These styles of thinking (or cognitive distortions) were gleaned from the work of several authors, including Albert Ellis, Aaron Beck, and David Burns, among others.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-71515556530234324342011-02-10T10:51:00.001-07:002011-02-10T10:51:50.636-07:00LOL<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/a7iAZQlf5_4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>Andy Samberg is hilarious.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-73242466611388548732011-02-03T16:56:00.000-07:002011-02-03T16:56:03.506-07:00Scottish CompassionA man was sitting on a blanket at the beach. He had no arms and no legs. <br />
<br />
Three women, from England, Wales, and Scotland, were walking past and felt sorry for the poor man. <br />
<br />
The English woman said "Have you ever had a hug?" The man said "No," so she gave him a hug and walked on. <br />
<br />
The Welsh woman said, "Have you ever had a kiss?" The man said, "No," so she gave him a kiss and walked on. <br />
<br />
The Scottish woman came to him and said, "'ave ya ever been fucked, laddie?" <br />
The man broke into a big smile and said, "No".<br />
<br />
She said, "Aye, ya will be when the tide comes in."MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-27080739185214186182011-01-23T14:04:00.000-07:002011-01-23T14:04:06.017-07:00Burns Night<b>Love In the Guise of Friendship</b><br />
<br />
Talk not of love, it gives me pain, <br />
For love has been my foe; <br />
He bound me in an iron chain, <br />
And plung'd me deep in woe. <br />
<br />
But friendship's pure and lasting joys, <br />
My heart was form'd to prove; <br />
There, welcome win and wear the prize, <br />
But never talk of love. <br />
<br />
Your friendship much can make me blest, <br />
O why that bliss destroy? <br />
Why urge the only, one request <br />
You know I will deny? <br />
<br />
Your thought, if Love must harbour there, <br />
Conceal it in that thought; <br />
Nor cause me from my bosom tear <br />
The very friend I sought. <br />
<br />
<b>Tragic Fragment</b><br />
<br />
All devil as I am-a damned wretch,<br />
A hardened, stubborn, unrepenting villain,<br />
Still my heart melts at human wretchedness;<br />
And with sincere but unavailing sighs<br />
I view the helpless children of distress:<br />
With tears indignant I behold the oppressor<br />
Rejoicing in the honest man's destruction,<br />
Whose unsubmitting heart was all his crime. -<br />
Ev'n you, ye hapless crew! I pity you;<br />
Ye, whom the seeming good think sin to pity;<br />
Ye poor, despised, abandoned vagabonds,<br />
Whom Vice, as usual, has turn'd o'er to ruin.<br />
Oh! but for friends and interposing Heaven,<br />
I had been driven forth like you forlorn,<br />
The most detested, worthless wretch among you!<br />
O injured God! Thy goodness has endow'd me<br />
With talents passing most of my compeers,<br />
Which I in just proportion have abused-<br />
As far surpassing other common villains<br />
As Thou in natural parts has given me more.MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-8352797031221919712011-01-10T11:18:00.002-07:002011-01-10T11:19:19.920-07:00Blood should be running in the streets<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/a6OQzH07u0U?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/a6OQzH07u0U?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-74060423092236697672010-12-20T14:49:00.000-07:002010-12-20T14:49:00.981-07:00A Little Running DittyThey say that running's good for you<br />
So do it every day<br />
It makes the sun shine in your heart<br />
It pushes clouds away!<br />
<br />
The more you run, the more you'll smile<br />
`til people stop and stare.<br />
They'll ask you what the magic is...<br />
Perhaps the clothes you wear?<br />
<br />
Even when your legs are sore,<br />
When you can barely move...<br />
Get out of bed, you sleepy head,<br />
And find your running groove.<br />
<br />
Ignore the doctors when they say<br />
To listen to your body...<br />
For if you do, it screams and yells,<br />
And says "take up karate!"<br />
<br />
Achilles Tendons, they will whine,<br />
And Plantar says "Don't go!"<br />
Hips and knees will plead with you<br />
They're not your friend but foe!<br />
<br />
Unless they're black or falling off,<br />
Nails are rather dumb!<br />
Who needs nails? They are a waste<br />
of precious calcium.<br />
<br />
Just tune it out, the whole damn thing<br />
From toe to empty head.<br />
For if you listen, you'll be found<br />
Alone and sad in bed.<br />
<br />
Your ass will fill with fatty cells,<br />
Your belly it will swell,<br />
Your lungs will shrink,<br />
You'll lose your dink<br />
Your feet will really smell!<br />
<br />
So run, run, run, You Dicks and Janes,<br />
Put on those shorts and shoes!<br />
At Seven Miles you'll find those smiles<br />
Have pushed away the Blues!MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14434437.post-77500869772900485442010-12-08T12:24:00.002-07:002010-12-08T12:24:23.388-07:00Ah, MemoriesThis will be remembered at one of the pinnacles in Vancouver's history! What an amazing time it was; it's very hard to believe it was almost a year ago already.<br />
<object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/nHCuvHYAIFI?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/nHCuvHYAIFI?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>MBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13376297905063624827noreply@blogger.com0