May 26, 2006
CO2
These ads, brought to you by our conservative, global-warming-denying friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, are ludicrous.
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November 21, 2005
a revolutionary edumakation
We watched a sweet German flick, The Edukators (dir. Hans Weingartner), on Saturday.
Basic plot: band of three revolutionary 20-somethings break into houses of the rich while the cats are away, rearrange furniture and belongings without stealing of damaging anything and leave a note saying “Your days of plenty are numbered.” (Here’s an online taste of their shenanigans.) Of course, complications develop: they take a prisoner, they fall in love, they question the revolution. It’s a movie that feels close to home. The characters and conversations are familiar — just replace the young adult post-communist European angst of the Edukators with ruminations and calls action to on environmentalism, monopolistic two-party politics, globalization, etc…. that seem to dominate the political dialogue in countries whose rebellious youth is too young to remember communist rule on their home soil.
And there’s a great dinner-table scene. Great because it puts at the same table a young idealistic revolutionary with an older, conservative member of society. Like that sweet dinner table scene in “I [heart] Huckabees” where Mark Whalberg reams out the conservative, religious SUV-driving father, it’s that conversation you always wanted to have with the person that you’ll never meet.
So it does drag a little in the middle (130 minutes long) and has a quick hitting, hard-to-interpret ending (we had a different read on it than my folks who coincidentally also watched it this weekend). All in all, though, this movie quickly attained the status of “must recommend and talk about with friends”. Get there.
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November 08, 2005
biking for change
One of my oldest friends, David Kroodsma a.k.a. “Kroody”, began a year-long bike trip starting in Stanford, CA and ending in Tierra del Fuego. Check out his website/trip log at rideforclimate.com.
Some say he is riding because he likes doing epic things. Others (himself included) argue he is riding to increase awareness of global climate change. He has visited handful of elementary and high school classrooms both in Massachusetts and California and students will be tracking his progress and reading his updates from the road.
He is a wonderful travelogue writer and having spent the last five years in the environmental/outdoorsy/scientific community at Stanford, he has a great grasp of and explains really well the science and politics underpinning climate change. I highly recommend checking in on this site once and a while (link to the rss feed).
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October 12, 2005
times select
I’ve been so pissed at the NYTimes for putting their heavy-hitter op-ed pieces behind a subscribers-only wall that I’ve basically stopped reading anything Times-related (except for doing the crosswords, of course). So this chart at a post over at Daily Kos put a smile on my face.
I mean, blog references aren’t the be all end all of citation indexes, but it’s pretty sweet to see that this decision to create an online gated community are backfiring. It is a pity that the insights of Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, etc… are now available only to people who have $15/month to shell out for journalism and a pity that the NYTimes will only become more beholden to an increasingly elite readership. I remember going to a forum in NYC after September 11th where the international editor of the Times said that any time they put a picture of a dying Palestinian child on the front page they received thousands of irate emails and phone calls. What will happen now when they post something that the paying online subscribers don’t want to hear? It is crazy that the BBC does so much better than the Times anyways, and to think that they are public and funded by the government…that’s crazy talk. We over here in America know that no high-quality product ever comes out of a government-funded anything.
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May 25, 2005
U.S.A. blues
Here’s a quick and dirty comparison between a new map of the U.S. and one that probably is all too familiar. I’ve seen a map of the Confederacy overlaid in this same manner, but I’m not going to do too much wild speculating here, just let the dark shades of blue speak in the way that only numbers can. There are no earth-shattering conclusions to draw from this comparison, only a hint at one aspect of the divide of the union. A few basic observations:First, the more known map of the two, from a UMichigan faculty “site” (need I explain?):http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/ :
Second, a lesser known and recent map from the MMWR :
Update: a recent Daily Kos post has an interesting addendum to these charts (or these charts are an interesting addendum…whatever, you get the point).
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May 24, 2005
On the road for respect
I’d been hearing rumblings about this trip for almost a year now, but this massive roadtrip now looks like it’s really taking shape. The basic idea: hit a U.S. state capitol every day for 50 days (starting on July 4th) and each day “offer a free acoustic concert on the capitol building grounds”.
The mission is both artisitic and political, a familiar chord with the anize crowd.How can you call a place home if you are a stranger to its names? Especially today, in a media age, when names have newfound power, when until you have been to Alabama it will remain an immaculate myth, subjecting you to its celebrity, estranging you from the union to which it � undeniably - belongs. But it is our union; this is not a matter of choice or opinion; we have been born into it and bear its name. We will not be estranged from it; we will not be homeless; we will take ownership.There’s a raw boldness here, a willingness to go out and experience the state of the union (our country is in fragments, they say); a set of familiar liberal values (Free performances. Outdoors, at sites open to everyone, on ground dedicated to the public trust) coupled with the admirable and ambitious goal of seeking a common language and a middle-ground. A New American Language a la Dan Bern — we can only hope that more travellers hear his cutting advice as a similar call to action:
Tourist towns can be a drag sometimes But in non-tourist towns, you can get beat up
Just for looking a little different
I guess the thing to do, is just stay at home.
-Bern, in NAL
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May 04, 2005
A Rocky sense of freedom
Last night was the first time in a while that I had watched some TV. A friend has TiVO, so we skipped around between the Sox game and various recorded goodies. If I ever do become a TV-watcher (please no) it seems like TiVO would be the way to do it. Commercial-free, finds the shows you want, when you want, etc…
I got the crib-notes version of Rocky IV, skimming to the best scenes here and there (training scene with 80s music, Rocky’s mourning scene, the fight). I don’t remember the Cold War much other than reading about the collapse of the USSR on a family vacation in the southwest and my dad telling me that I should remember this moment. So Rocky IV makes me think about that older different culture of fear and and the national enemy of the 1980s (back when bin Laden was on our side, kind of). Rocky’s good ol’ American rhetoric is “I’m doing this for myself and my family”. And Ivan Drago, the Soviet muscle machine prototype, calls out in his final moments “I fight for myself” (or something along those lines), a revolt against his fatherland trainers who have been engineering him towards human perfection. To top it off, Rocky tells the hostile-turned-friendly Soviet crowd that he felt them change toward him during the fight and that he knows they are capable of more change.
It’s a fresh reminder of the historical context to current political debates. It sounds obvious, but to people (like me) born late enough that the Cold War was really over by the time young-adult consciousness set in, a lot of the lessons and dynamics of this conflict are not ingrained. For example, Rocky IV reminds me why people have a bad impression of communism (cold, bald men breeding blond-haired human machines for the state) when I think of it as an innocuous localized ideology espoused by my hippy friends. But it’s also a reminder that the freedom that we enjoy here in the US comes from an intellectual and practical tradition of individualist values and self-reliance.
It’s where that individualism turns to self-interest and in turn empire that I start to fall out of love with the ideals of this country.
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April 25, 2005
GMO
I sent a friend an exerpt from the Harper’s Weekly Review earlier this week:
…and brewer Anheuser-Busch, America’s number one buyer of rice, announced that it will no longer buy rice from Missouri if that state allows genetically modified rice to be grown within its borders.”
And he replied:
So, I don’t know how I feel about this. I really think that all of the anti-gmo activism is really misdirected, as I think we will severely need genetically modified crops to help feed the world in this century. I think that people overstate the risks, especially when compared to the risks of pesticide use, the clearing of more land for farming (because yields are lower because we are not using gmo crops), and starvation in third world countries which could be helped by specifically working the genetics of third world crops. That being said, there are clear problems with the way gmo research is done now—namely, it is only done by a few companies which patent the genes. The incentive is thus only to develop crops that are good for first world countries, and to only research things like corn because you have to buy your seed every year for corn (unlike rice and wheat, which you can use from your old crop), and farmers become dependent on it. Also, research is hampered because of patents—they recently engineered a type of rice that had vitamin a in it, which could potentially prevent millions and millions of cases of blindness in malnourished parts of Asia, but they could not sell it because the scientist who did it violated something like 40 patent rights (it’s called golden rice).
What I think we should be arguing for is:
1) more public research of gmo crops and less private research
2) patent laws which make it much more difficult (or impossible) to patent genes
3) severely increased gmo research for crops in third world countries, especially Africa.
Essentially, not completely ceasing GMOs.
I don’t know how we advance those points though—maybe a simple anti GMO message is best until they reform the system. I don’t know. it just upsets me to see people get up in arms about gmos.
He’s good, and it left me wondering why I’m the one with a blog.
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April 22, 2005
Rachel Carson vs. Adam Smith
The Economist’s latest print edition bares the title “Rescuing Environmentalism”. The leader article opens with a reference to the widely hoo-ha’d Death of Environmentalism article that was presented to the Environmental Grantmakers Association this past fall, dousing the firey words of traditional environmental organizing groups with a bracing new reality.
If environmental groups continue to reject pragmatic solutions and instead drift toward Utopian (or dystopian) visions of the future, they will lose the battle of ideas. And that would be a pity, for the world would benefit from having a thoughtful green movement. It would also be ironic, because far-reaching advances are already under way in the management of the world’s natural resources�changes that add up to a different kind of green revolution. This could yet save the greens (as well as doing the planet a world of good).
I usually like the tone (if not the content) of the Economist because their agenda always seems to be about consensus-building around things that their British editors feel are common-sense. That said, they didn’t seem to finish reading “Death…” . They missed it’s main point, that it is not about the numbers but about the framing of arguments around other issues.
If governments invest seriously in green data acquisition and co-ordination, they will no longer be flying blind. And by advocating data-based, analytically rigorous policies rather than pious appeals to �save the planet�, the green movement could overcome the scepticism of the ordinary voter. It might even move from the fringes of politics to the middle ground where most voters reside.
I wish environmentalism could be reduced to a game of numbers, but it’s not like there is a lack of numbers about the destruction of the environmment out there. To be calling for more seems a bit out of touch. In fact, the only example they cite is “The marginal cost of removing the last 5% of a given pollutant is often far higher than removing the first 5% or even 50%: for public policy to ignore such facts would be inexcusable.” But that is an example of how an environmental statistic could easily be turned against the movement: “Why try to change it if the last 5% is what matters. We’re never going to completely eliminate it.” By my political yardstick, the Economist falls short by calling for more data instead of more ideas. The whole idea behind the “Death…” article is to merge environmental causes and issues with other market forces like labor and energy lobbyists, to find a joint mission that appeals to unions and people who care about how much money they are spending on gas. People hear enough numbers to make them lose trust in them, and remember, faithful Economists, people listen to the silent commands of their pocketbooks.
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April 10, 2005
F%!@ing war
I ran across this great Boston Globe op-ed piece from November that spins a nice perspective on the kerfluffle about the censoring of a for-TV version of “Saving Public Ryan”. The issue was not its graphic depiction of war (aren’t we already desensitized from network news?) but its profane language:
Speaking of television, is it an accident that the nation finds itself most intensely at war in the season when the Viagra theme song has become a kind of anthem? Male impotence, or fears of it, are openly referred to, but the problem has its effect far more broadly than in bedrooms. Beware a heavily armed nation that acts like a man with something to prove.
Because of the puritanical way in which “moral values” are defined in contemporary America, the connection between killing and sex is not regarded as fit for public discussion any more than the connection, say, between fears of impotence and gun ownership would be. But as suggested by an election in which Iraq was not an issue but homosexuality was, it is not sex we cannot openly contemplate but the actualities of violence. In war, human beings hand over ethical decision-making to a chain of command. Private soldiers do this, but so do the populations of war-making nations. This is the ultimate in impotence. We Americans watched the unfolding story of Fallujah as if we were not responsible for it.
There’s a dated reference here to the post-election frustration (although remembering that pain and anger probably is not a bad thing). More importantly, there is a timeless reminder to focus on the important problems (war, sexual repression) and stop squabbling over the “bad” words that we all hear everyday.
What could possibly be driving our nation to this “leveling” of Iraq? We don’t know, and we don’t want to know. We are ordering our young people to leap into a volcano. Our warplanes spew fire on the heads of old men, women, and children. We are turning cities into ashes. Meanwhile, what offends us is the Anglo-Saxon word for what people do when they are lonely or in love.
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