Matins

¶ At The Infrastructurist, Scott Huter, author of On the Grid, argues that life “off the grid” is a mirage.

I found myself on a radio show one day with someone who wrote a book about going off the grid, and before even going on the air he told our host he didn’t wish to be identified as speaking from the United Kingdom. He was in London, the host was in Massachusetts, and I was in Raleigh. We spoke to one another as though we were in the same room – and he was arguing against the grid. I’ll leave you to determine whether there’s irony there, though I’ll point out that data centers, filled with the computers and air conditioners that run the communications grid, are enormous industrial users of grid power.

I’m not against sustainability – I’m for anything that saves resources, improves systems, and may save our planet before we fry it in its own petroleum-based oils. But driving your grid-produced pickup to get your grid-produced lumber at a big box store, driving on grid-paved highways to your mountain acres whose streams are protected by multiple layers of grid-powered government, and then using your grid-supplied plans to build a windmill to power your grid-produced computer as it gathers its information from grid-produced satellites? And then pointing at your windmill and your satellite dish and your septic tank and saying, “Look at me! I’m off the grid!”

I don’t buy it.

We don’t, either. We want very smart, well-maintained grids.

Lauds

¶ “It’s not our issue.” Marc Wolf, writer and performer of the one-man show, Another American: Asking and Telling (appearing Off Broadway through the end of August) pinpoints the socioeconomic divide that has deprived gay men and women in the military from the support of the gay-rights movement. (NYT; via  Arts Journal)

Most gay people that I know here in New York City have no interest in serving in the military nor have any idea why a gay person would want to serve in the military. And the gay civil-rights movement, at both national and grass roots levels, has only recently embraced the issue.

An example of this: A straight couple came to see “Another American” and, after the performance, the woman asked if she could approach the gay and lesbian Center in the Ohio city where she lived to see if they would present my show. I agreed, and she called me in shock a few days later. The center had told her: “It’s not our issue.”
Why is that? Randy Shilts points out in “Conduct Unbecoming” that the gay civil-rights movement was heavily influenced by the peace movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

As a result, there has always tended to be an anti-authoritarian and anti-militaristic slant to the gay-rights movement. Couple this with the fact that most gay people in the military do not come from the higher socio-economic, more urban communities that traditionally have staffed the national gay rights organizations, and you begin to understand why this has not always been our issue.

Prime

¶ Joe Quinn’s eloquent denunciation of “the elites,” at Zero Hedge, seems straightforwardly populist — but this is not the universal populism of popular theory (pitting millions of “little people” against the “fat cats”). It’s rather the indignation (populism is always indignant) of the non-professional middle class. There is also a certain slippage in the address: we suspect tha Mr Quinn’s most enthusiastic readers will not have piled up consumer debt, piling up rather contempt and pitilessness for those who did.

Here is the message from the ruling elite to you ignorant masses: Debt got us into this mess and it sure as hell is going to get us out. They have convinced the mainstream media that the reason the economy is sputtering is because the average Joe is not doing their part. This crazy concept of saving for a rainy day seems to be catching on. This is very dangerous. Savings could lead to investment and long-term stability. The ruling elite will have none of that foolishness. The mainstream media is telling you that this new found austerity will push us back into recession. The talking heads continue to pound away that you have reduced your spending too much, when anyone with a calculator and half a brain (Krugman doesn’t make the cut) can determine that the decrease in consumer debt outstanding is completely the result of write-offs by the mega elite banks. Consumers are living off their credit cards at this point.

The military industrial complex continues to do the heavy lifting for this economy. If they weren’t blowing up bridges, power plants and orphanages in foreign countries and then rebuilding them at ten times the expected cost, how would they possibly spend $895 billion per year. It ain’t easy to waste that kind of money annually. Whenever some crazy dude like Ron Paul questions the need to spend as much as the rest of the world combined on the military, some potential terrorists are captured in the nick of time and the threat level is raised to Orange (thanks Tom Ridge). The “professional” journalists on the major networks then do their part in this farce by spreading fear among the general population. Rinse and repeat.

Tierce

¶ First, the good news. Stanford scientist Mark Jacobson has determined, from computer simulations, that reducing soot would work an immediate reversal of global warming. (Wired Science)

“If you just eliminate soot, you get a significant climate benefit, and you can do it on a short time period, because soot has a life of just a few weeks,” said Jacobson. “You don’t get the full response for a while, as there are deep ocean feedbacks that take a long time, but it’s a lot faster than controlling CO2.”

Jacobson simulated the effects of curtailing soot from fossil-fuel emissions, something that’s already possible with tailpipe and smokestack filters. He simulated the effects of replacing wood- and dung-burning cookfires with clean-burning stoves. And he simulated both advances simultaneously.

If soot disappeared overnight, average global temperatures would drop within 15 years by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, maybe a little more. That’s about half the net warming — total global warming, minus cooling from sun-reflecting aerosols — experienced since the beginning of the industrial age. The effect would be even larger in the Arctic, where sea ice and tundra could rapidly refreeze.

¶ Now, the bad news. China’s filthy air. We passed over this Times story yesterday, because it’s not really news to anyone who has been awake for the past ten years. But in conjunction with the Jacobson simulations, it shows how difficult any kind of soot clean-up is going to be.

The quality of air in Chinese cities is increasingly tainted by coal-burning power plants, grit from construction sites and exhaust from millions of new cars squeezing onto crowded roads, according to a government study issued this week. Other newly released figures show a jump in industrial accidents and an epidemic of pollution in waterways.

The report’s most unexpected findings pointed to an increase in inhalable particulates in cities like Beijing, where officials have struggled to improve air quality by shutting down noxious factories and tightening auto emission standards. Despite such efforts, including an ambitious program aimed at reducing the use of coal for home heating, the average concentration of particulates in the capital’s air violated the World Health Organization’s standards more than 80 percent of the time during the last quarter of 2008.

Sext

¶ Our Man in Manila, Migs Bassig, has set up a new blog, Oh, Dear!, and we see in an instant how right he was to disregard our advice (develop the new writing, then move the blog). Sometimes the medium and the message are in bed together!

The new blog’s first post concerns a very popular television show, Wowowee.

One of these segments was called “Hep Hep, Hooray”. Twenty random audience members lined up on the kindergarten-colored stage (the Wowowee set is in Quezon City) for a simple elimination game. The rules were simple: they had to complete the title phrase once it was their turn to cheer. If the host put the microphone right in front of one contestant, that contestant had to say “Hep Hep” while clapping his or her hands below the waist, or “Hooray” while raising his or her hands. Contestants who broke the cheer or made a mistake with the gestures were eliminated. The grand prize was ten thousand pesos; the nineteen losers, meanwhile, each walked away with a thousand pesos and a gift pack containing deodorants.

Another segment was called “Questune”, where contestants had to guess the titles of songs. Until they pressed the buzzer, however, they had to keep their hands below their chins, so that they looked as though they were mimicking monkeys.

In a future entry, we hope to learn why Wowowee was canceled.

Nones

¶ At The Bygone Bureau, a further dispatch from Pohnpei, in Micronesia, where Jonathan Gourlay has gone native, to the extent that witches’ spells and brews really do “work.”

The Pohnpeian secretaries at the college where I work are hatching a plan to slip some magic in our coffee pot. They cast a little spell into eight mashed leaves. The spell causes divorce. But, they think, what if other people drink the magic coffee? There would be a divorce epidemic among coffee drinkers in Faculty Building B. They can’t think of a way to make me think clearly.

The cleaning crew, librarians, secretaries and even various vice presidents are all united in hoping that I can break the spell that Popo’s mother has cast upon me. This spell causes me not to understand what is going on. Popo runs around every night and yet I don’t seem to register this fact. I’m in a daze where what is normal keeps shifting around. It just seems natural that my fate is to be sucked dry of money, thoughts, dreams, while Popo spends her nights partying at the Skylight Hotel, crashing our car. More than once she has ended up in jail, where she likes to yell at the guards about the affairs she knows they’re having. They’re glad to be rid of her in the morning.

There was no magic, no remedy, no special herbal concoction that caused my mind to realize what I surely already knew. No, it was an American who has that direct quality of Americans that is the opposite of magic. He said that he was my friend and therefore could no longer listen to people laughing at me because my wife is running around with some guy and spending all of my money. He said it in simple sentences that I could understand. I had to leave. Take my daughter, Peanut. Say goodbye to Polynn. Run away.

The coffee was suspiciously bitter that morning.

Vespers

¶ At the Guardian, English literature professor Gabriel Josipovici lets loose on the lions of modern English literature. Born in 1940, Mr Josipovici is no young Turk, but his views appear to have currency among the Man Booker judges. As everyone and his aunt has observed, this year’s list is missing the once-great names of Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, McEwan, &c. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

While great novels deal with complex events beyond the full understanding of both the characters and the reader, too many contemporary works follow traditional plots with neat endings, he said.

Referring to graduates, like McEwan, of the University of East Anglia’s famous creative writing course, Josipovici said: “They all tell stories in a way that is well crafted, but that is almost the most depressing aspect of it — a careful craft which seems to me to be hollow.”

He singled out The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan’s story of obsession, as easy to read but lacking “a sense of destiny, of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words”, unlike that experienced through Proust or Henry James. McEwan’s novel is read “to pass the time”, he said.

Such novels had a “lack of vision and limited horizons”.

“One finishes them and feels, ‘So what?’ – so very different from the gut-wrenching experience of reading Herman Melville’s Bartleby or William Golding’s The Inheritors,” said Josipovici.

We disagree on the sole point of Ian McEwan, beneath the banked fires of whose brilliantly poised prose we sense a throbbing companionship of grief.

Compline

¶ The confessions of a one-time “warblogger” — remember them? (Remember paying attention to them, that is.) A reminder that a life built on anger and hostility really does work for some people, some of the time. Michele Catalano at This Ia a Thing. (via The Awl)

People would say, how could you align yourselves with them? How could I still say I was anti-religion and for gay rights and all that other stuff I stood for, how could I say that if I was part of the other side now? And I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to answer that. I didn’t know how to say “I have no idea what I believe I just know that if I stop screaming I might end up killing myself so I’m going to stay here with the screaming people.”

Do you know how easy it is to lie to yourself? Do you know how easy it is to make yourself believe all the things you want to believe like, your life is good and you’re happy and carefree and everything is really fucking great? Lying to yourself with ease makes it so much easier to lie to everyone else. Oh yes, I’m perfectly happy being a bitter, angry blogger. I’m perfectly happy having 20 anxiety attacks a day. I’m perfectly happy living in a basement apartment with two kids and a second husband who makes me feel like my soul has sprung a leak. Happy. Happy, happy, happy. Life is good. And so is gin.

And so it went. I went on appearing to everyone online (and at this point my blog had about 10,000 hits a day and I was doing interviews with the BBC and such) like I was some rabid warmonger and as my old friends left in droves most of my new friends proved to be nothing more than sharks who were all too happy to feed off of me.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 10:30 am.