stargeek
Who Says Black Theater Is Having a Tough Time?Who Says Black Theater Is Having a Tough
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 As much as I
enjoy blogging, there are times it becomes an ordeal, especially when
I
am plagued by deadlines or a heavy workload. As I've reported before,
being an empty-nester and night-owl allows me to devote 2-3 hours per
day to the hobby -- most of the time. When I can't, it shows. How can
you maintain a good blog in less time? Here are a few ideas.
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 Red line: carrying capacity of Earth with wilderness and non-human life sacrificed; Green line: carrying capacity of Earth with some wilderness and non-human life retained, at historical and forecast average consumption and agricultural productivity levels. My friend Jon Husband has an astounding ability to harvest the most important writing on the Internet and route it selectively through to his very substantial networks, mostly in person (he really gets around) or by personal e-mail rather than through his excellent blog. In the past week he's sent me four articles I missed, each of which has significantly radicalized my thinking. So today, I'm going to pass on the favour to my readers, with a tip of the hat to Jon. #1: The Coming Energy Crisis: Stan Goff In this very long article, Goff deconstructs the myth that solar and wind energy, the 'hydrogen economy', biomass and nuclear power all combined are capable of staving off economic collapse as the availability of hydrocarbons peaks around 2010 (or shortly thereafter, if we allow the oil companies to ravage the rest of earth's wilderness to extend the peak a couple of years) just as the demand for them, especially by the exploding Asian economies, is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Goff tilts rather unseemingly at John Kerry and the Sierra Club for not 'getting it', and some of his sources (e.g. Pimentel's arguments about the efficiency of alternative energy) are somewhat dubious, but for the most part Goff's arguments are sound and compelling. The lessons from history that Goff draws from the work of the late (and invisible on the Internet) British historian Mark Jones are particularly striking. By 2030, Goff argues, per capita energy consumption, as a result of rapidly diminishing supply and continued population growth, will have inevitably declined to 1930 levels, followed by a continued downward spiral over the succeeding century to 'stone age' levels. At the same time the initial effects of catastrophic global warming -- weather disasters, damage from desertification and floods, crop failures and more -- will be ramping up. Goff describes the massive inefficiency of our current urban agricultural-industrial model (use of 90 calories of energy in the US to produce one calorie of food, for example), and the inevitable acceleration of costly and destructive imperialist military adventures to hoard the remaining oil for the countries most dependent on it, at precisely the time when conservation and collaboration to solve this massive problem and try to minimize its effects -- mostly through conservation (rationing) -- are most desperately needed. Modern agriculture, which, as Richard Manning has pointed out, consumes more oil energy (in fertilizers etc.) than it produces, will be critically affected, and will itself exacerbate the water shortages, deforestation, ocean life depletion and desertification produced by global warming. After some rambling, Goff gets to the bottom line: (a) The third world cannot be developed, nor can its 'standard of living' (consumption) be raised to first-world levels: There just isn't enough energy and other resources to go around -- it's a zero-sum game, and that means the longer the first-world continues consuming the way it is, the greater the suffering and misery of the third world, and the greater the eco-catastrophe produced by the first-world's extravagant effluent, and (b) The only answer is massive conservation enabled by a social-political revolution, because the powers that be aren't going to give up their power peacefully or willingly. #2: War Crimes and Imperial Fantasies: Noam Chomsky In an interview for Alternative Radio, the always-provocative (and sometimes annoyingly condescending) Chomsky suggests that the ideological, imperialist, neoconservative, corporatist agenda that Bush has followed in the past four years, and promises to accelerate in the next four, is nothing new in America. Indeed, he says, it has been the basis of US foreign policy without interruption since the end of WW2, under both Republican and Democratic regimes. It's just that before we weren't told about it. In dozens of countries around the world, the US has tortured and killed thousands, toppled democratic governments, destroyed economies and wrecked social systems. He argues that there has been a decades-long media-supported campaign of disinformation, denial and cover-up to conceal news of America's murderous and anti-democratic adventures abroad -- but just from Americans. No surprise, then, that the rest of the world 'hates' America and Americans don't understand why. He goes on to argue that what Eisenhower called "the military-industrial complex" -- in his surprising and oft-quoted warning about his fears of its dangerous influence over political affairs -- is the "core of the modern economy", and that most government programs are designed to "socialize costs" -- to let taxpayers pay for them and take the risks if they fail, and corporations reap the benefits. There will be no significant change in US foreign policy no matter who is elected in November, he says, but the election will have important ramifications for domestic policy. "They [the Bush people] want to destroy the whole array of progressive achievements of the past century. They've already more or less gotten rid of progressive income tax. They're trying to destroy the limited medical care system. The new pharmaceutical bill is a step towards that. They're going after Social Security. They probably will go after schools. They do not want a small government, any more than Reagan did. They want a huge government, and massively intrusive. They hate free markets. But they want it to work for the rich. The Kerry people will do something not fantastically different, but less so. They have a different constituency to appeal to, and they are much more likely to protect some limited form of benefits for the general population." So Chomsky says it's important to get out and support Kerry, as a first essential step towards a longer-term and more fundamental reform of the US political and economic system to restore democracy, end imperialism, and repair America's reputation in the world. #3: The Death of Progressive Values: George Lakoff In a lengthy interview, Lakoff urges progressives to wake up and see what's happening before the well-oiled and well-orchestrated neocon propaganda machine wins an inexorable share of the hearts and minds of Americans. You can't persuade people who have bought into the compelling conservative mindset by arguing within their 'frames', he says. You need to 'reframe' the discussion to appeal to people's values by showing and teaching that it is progressive values, principles, and policy directions that have made America great. (A policy direction is something like "Let's have a sustainable environment" and "Working people shouldn't be living in poverty" and "Everybody should have health care.") These principles, not programs and platforms, are what people, including most conservatives, buy into, and if progressives talked about them they would reframe political discourse to their advantage, instead of getting hopelessly mired in conservative frames around 'family values', good vs evil, etc. And progressives need to go on the attack, not against conservative principles, but against the legacy of conservative administrations that have failed to deliver what they promised: "When they have a case to be made on the basis of a pattern of behavior, progressives don't tend to use a grammar that really nails the message, like 'We're weaker in education, and here's why. We're weaker in security, and here's why.' You could write this argument in half a page." Likewise, the discussion on tax cuts should be reframed as a discussion on cuts to investment in our future. People, he says, also need to be educated that business gets far more benefits from government infrastructure and investment than they're paying for in corporate taxes, and that simply isn't fair. And progressives should not even talk about the "war on terror" or other purely metaphorical, unwinnable wars, but should reframe the discussion around how the actions of conservative administrations have weakened the country, made people more vulnerable, destroyed global alliances, endangering troops, and mired the country in costly, damaging, needless wars. In this brief commencement address, the former JFK aide, laments the "mean-spirited mediocrity" of an America that has begun to decline, and which has destroyed its moral authority -- its greatest weapon against terrorism. Thanks to incompetent, ideologically-driven leaders, he says, the world no longer trusts America to be honest, to keep its word, to respect global values of peace, caring for others, justice, truth, human rights, fair-mindedness, civility. "We are no longer the world's leaders on matters of international law and peace. After we stopped listening to others, they stopped listening to us. A nation without credibility and moral authority cannot lead, because no one will follow", he says. He points out the irony of being accused, and with good reason, both of reckless and imperialist interventionism (in Iraq) and of isolationism (in Sudan and elsewhere) -- Evidence, he says, of atrociously immoral judgement. He concludes with a reminder that the Islamic world had universities and observatories long before the West had railroads, an unsubtle reminder of the dangers of ignorance of the lessons of history. It's an interesting speech in the context of Lakoff's comments, above. Despite its eloquence, Sorensen's speech is largely preaching to the progressive choir, and unlikely to move conservatives who, not understanding his frames, won't even understand where he's coming from.  All of this is very discouraging. It is easy at times to yield to the temptation to wallow in despair, to succumb to the seduction of hopelessness and depression that at least briefly relieves us of the awful responsibility for fixing this horrendous mess. As someone who has dealt with depression all my life, I don't blame those who give up the fight -- they tried their best, and that's all you can ask from anyone. For the rest of us, we can and must fight on. Nothing less than the survival of our planet is at stake. And while our success is far from certain, there is reason for optimism. And as TS Eliot said in Four Quartets: So each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling, Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer By strength and submission, has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate -- but there is no competition -- There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. Most important -- Be good to yourself. We all need to stay healthy for the hard work ahead. Jon is looking for beta testers for his organization's new information aggregation and publishing tool, which appears to have some of the functionality I was calling for in my Personal Knowledge Management post. If you're interested, you can sign up here. |
 There are several new
and improved tools available that make blogging a bit easier:Technorati, the tool that tells you how many inbound blogs link to your blog, has now released its beta of its improved version -- faster loading, better looking. The old version is no longer spidering for new inbound blogs, so if you want to see where you stand go to the beta page. Technorati also includes the valuable Interesting Recent Blogs list (smaller blogs getting an unusual amount of attention, and why) plus Breaking News (hottests memes in the blogosphere today). They're not yet moved over to the new beta yet. For status on the changeover and other interesting info on the blogosphere, blogroll Technorati founder David Sifry's Alerts. Next up is David Winer's Share Your OPML, a tool that will answer the question "Who subscribes to my blog's RSS feed". It also lists the Top 100 most RSS-subscribed blogs, and How to Save the World briefly made the list, but now I'm hovering just under the cutoff point. Some other cute tools worth exploring as well, like a page showing all the graphics in the Top 100 blogs in the last two days. Finally, quite a few bloggers are using Bloglines, a "a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines". I haven't tried it yet, but it looks interesting. And if you haven't already discovered Blogstreet, which ranks the Top 500 blogs in different ways, and the Waypath Buzzometer, which tracks how often different words and phrases are appearing in the blogosphere, you owe it to yourself to check them out too. |
 When I was researching the article One Billion Americans?, I got thinking about the implications of the wildly conservative Census Bureau projections of US population, and the embarrassing drastic upward revisions that have been made to them, for global population projections. What made the US projections so wrong (US population peaking at 295 million was predicted as recently as fifteen years ago) was the compound error of underestimating the extent of immigration and overestimating the rate at which immigrants adjust their family size to the average of their new country, or the global average. It's an understandable error -- there's lots of evidence that population growth rates in the developing world are falling quickly. But that's not because third world countries are evolving to two-child-or-less families as infant mortality drops. Rather, it's because those countries are simply unable to sustain more children, so parents are reluctantly, temporarily reducing family size as a result. Give them the option to emigrate to a developed country, and cultural preference, religious dictates, and improved health care will jump their family size (and life expectancy) back up again. And as inevitable ecological and humanitarian catastrophes arise in the 21st century in dozens of third world countries, compounded by the scourges of new diseases, horrendous shortages of clean water, and desertification and crop flooding due to global warming, the pressure to increase immigration quotas by orders of magnitude will be fierce. Back in 1990 when the pundits were predicting US population would peak at 295 million (it passed that level last year and is now expected to peak at between 550 million and 1.2 billion, if it peaks at all), they were saying global population would peak at around 9-11 billion in 2100. But for that to happen with a US population of, say, 900 million instead of 300 million, would mean average third world family size would be much smaller than average US family size. The UN projections, for example, assume annual average growth rate for Africa, Asia and Latin America of 0.5% in the latter half of this century, compared to a current growth rate in those areas (even including China with its already-low birth rate) of 2.1%, and compared to a current US growth rate of 0.9%, which is trending back up to a projected 1.3% rate for most of the current century, thanks to immigration. So the 9-11 billion global peak population just doesn't add up. While it doesn't make sense to get Malthusian and project population will grow indefinitely at current rates (1.3%, i.e. a doubling every 50 years to 24 billion by 2100), it's equally illogical and irresponsible to suggest that the whole world will start immediately radically reducing its fertility rate to achieve in just two generations the low fertility rate that Europe took one hundred generations to reach. If you assume that the levels of immigration now projected by the US Census Bureau will prevail throughout the developed world, that first- and second-generation citizens of developed countries will continue to have considerably larger-than-replacement level families in their new adopted countries, that the prevailing pro-fertility population dogmas of organized world religions will not suddenly be changed, that population pressure in the third world will be eased somewhat by immigration and that modest drops in family size in those countries will be largely offset by longer life expectancy, as has been observably the case in almost every third world country except China, then instead of the 9-11 billion peak the UN is currently talking about, you end up with population soaring past 14 billion in 2100, with no end in sight (left chart above). The curved red line shows the carrying capacity of Earth, assuming a modest annual increase in productivity from the current 30 billion acres (productive-capacity adjusted), assuming average footprint per capita continues to increase by a modest 1% per year, and assuming no land on the planet is reserved for wilderness or natural space for the rest of Earth's creatures. It shows in 2000 that the world could sustain 5 billion humans at the then-prevailing level of consumption. That's a billion humans less than actually inhabited the planet then, possible only by depriving much of the world of a subsistence level of resources, and by taking more from the Earth (in non-renewable resources) than we replaced, essentially stealing the excess from future generations. At the expected global level of per-capita consumption in 2100 (still well below today's North American consumption levels), carrying capacity drops to 2 billion humans. That number is substantiated by a recent C ornell study that says the choice in 2100 is between 2 billion people living a comfortable but not lavish life (achieved by a drastic population reduction) or 12 billion "struggling in misery". And if you want to allow 50% of the planet's surface for other life forms, you need to achieve double that reduction (green line), to one billion people, the level both Jim Merkel and Bill McKibben think we should strive for. That's only achievable, short of coercion, by an average one child family worldwide for the next century. The right chart shows that the increasing average footprint, driven both by North American excess and the surging resource use of China's billion plus people, will drive the aggregate human footprint up even more sharply than aggregate population, from 37 billion acres today (20% more than Earth's carrying capacity) to 210 billion acres in 2100 (six times Earth's carrying capacity). Now remember, these assumptions are much closer to the wildly optimistic assumptions of population levelling that the UN and other global agencies optimistically hope for, than to the Malthusian no-change projections that would see nearly double these numbers. Nevertheless, train wreck ahead. We simply have no choice. We must immediately and aggressively reduce our family sizes worldwide, and we must immediately and aggressively reduce per-capita resource consumption, waste and footprint. That means we must confront religions that don't actively encourage birth control and small families, and show those religions to be socially irresponsible. That means, too, we need to introduce ecological taxation measures to make excessive resource consumption and waste prohibitively expensive, and reward those who tread lightly on the Earth. |
Looks like all those pastel
PSPs Sony was showing at E3 were just a tease. According to an
interview in Japanese game magazine Famitsu, Sony claims the
various color PSPs were "just for reference. We plan to make the
system black." I wouldn't worry too much, though. I'm sure if the PSP
does well at all, color models will start showing up in no time at
all.
Read
[IGN via Portagame]
chrisabraham.com/2005/04/evil_man_in_bla.html
track
this site | 5 links
No word if the MPG-230M will be available for purchase any time
soon, at least here in the US. Korean importers might be the place to
start looking.
Read - New
Virtual Movie Glasses for Consumers by Accupix [I4U]
davidgelles.com/archives/2005/04/washington_impr.html
track
this site | 6 links
How is this measure in any way enforceable? Is the pilot expected to divert the flight? Perform a barrel roll at the first sign of a pee queue? And how, exactly, is the sight of multiple passengers simultaneously lunging from their seats towards a suddenly available lavatory an attractive alternative to having a little group milling about by one of the galleys?Link (via Dive into Mark)I was filled with curiousity to see if the pilot would perform an emergency landing at Reykjavik after the meal service, but of course (inevitably) everyone just ignored the directive, and let the passengers empty their bladders in peace. On an eight-hour flight with free alcohol and predominantly Russian passengers, there was just no other solution.
venisproductions.com/movies/heyyacb.html
track this
site | 8 links
While we’re on the topic of Panasonic, I’ll
also mention two other new home theater products from the
company.
The “SC-HT06” is a 2.1ch audio system with Dolby Virtual Speaker (DVS) technology. This is to fool you into thinking you have a real surround sound setup. The amplifier is provides a total 300W of output, and has three digital inputs: two optical and one coaxial.
“Dual Amp” technology is the focus of the “SA-XR55” amplifier, meaning you can provide twice the amount of power to your speakers. It has features out the wazoo: 7.1ch audio, 192kHz sampling all the way from input to output, and improvement of mid-range tones using “VGDA” (Variable Gain Digital Amplifier). You’ll probably find a crapload of things to like about the SA-XR55, assuming you can afford the 55,000 yen price tag.
SC-HT06 Press Release [Panasonic]
SA-XR55 Press Release [Panasonic]
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