Archive | April, 2011
Sunday Links
10 AprThe Atlantic: Japan Earthquake: One Month Later, 41 photos.
BBS: “New York is a major loser and Reykjavik a winner from new forecasts of sea level rise in different regions.”
Knight Foundation: Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril, and Potential of Networks. A Webinar on 20 April at 2 PM EDT. Download full report (PDF). “Rapid advances in digital media and technology are changing how we connect to information and each other. The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?”
LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art: “New York graffiti legend Lee Quinones has organized a team of street artists to do a new mural on the exterior wall facing Temple Street. Scaffolding is up now, with a couple of images in progress, and work is expected to be completed next week, before the April 17 opening of the “Art in the Streets” exhibition at the Geffen.”
Discussion of David Brooks oped at Marginal Revolution: Brooks says Dems are unwilling to ask voters to pay for the programs they want. “Until they find a way to pay for the programs they support, they will not be serious players in this game. They will have no credible plans and will be in an angry but permanent retreat.”
Thom Hartman, at Common Dreams: “With or without a government shutdown, Republicans have already won the debate on our nation’s budget. Why? Because the corporate media is on their side. Make the wealthy pay their fair share.”
Green Blog: “According to Gore nuclear energy is not the answer to our problems because it’s dirty, too expensive, unsafe and that it poses a threat to world peace.”
Where'd the oil go?
8 AprA mashup of video coverage of the ‘end game’ of the Gulf Oil disaster. These people obviously don’t know what they’re talking about, or are deceiving themselves and everyone else.
Courtesy of ChangingTheEndgame.
Corporate Schools, FAIL
7 AprIn Salon, testing scandals are rife:
Although the national media appear determined not to notice, similar testing scandals have taken place in New York, Texas, Georgia, California — basically anywhere school funding and/or jobs have been linked directly to multiple-choice testing. Private charter schools as well as public schools, incidentally.
“This is like an education Ponzi scam,” a teacher’s union official told USA Today. “If your test scores improve, you make more money. If not, you get fired. That’s incredibly dangerous.”
We aren’t going to make it to a new world by sending our kids to schools that constantly fail them. Where’s the alternative schooling going to come from?
Conundrums on the Left
6 AprJohn Quiggin has an interesting post at Crooked Timber about problems in formulating a leftist politics that makes sense. It’s mostly about Australia (where Quiggin lives and teaches), but it opens with a statement about things here in the USofA. He observes that “the fact that the base has nowhere to go, and can’t even justify abstention means that Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership can and do kick them (or, thinking more globally, us) with impunity.” He further observes:
The frustration felt on the left at present is (at least at my case) associated with a feeling that we should be doing a lot better. The case for market liberalism is in ruins after the Global Financial Crisis and it’s obvious that the reconstruction of the system has changed nothing, leaving the bankers unscathed and putting all the burden onto ordinary people. Left positions on lots of specific issues have much more public support than is evident from their political representation. The right screwed up massively over Iraq, is delusional on climate change and so on. And Obama won office easily running hard against Bush’s abuses on civil liberties and for a decent health care plan.
Maybe it’s time we make the move to Truth and Tradition. Instead of progressing into a nuclear disaster financed by fat cat bankers we need to conserve the land and our local communities.
Radioactive Currents off the Coast of Japan
6 AprMother Jones has a nice article about radioactivity off Japan’s coast, with lots of helpful graphics.
The good news is that the powerhouse of the Kuroshio Current—a humongous western boundary current like the Gulf Stream—appears to be forming a kind of firewall keeping the contamination away from Tokyo’s coast and funneling it east.
In conclusion:
Whatever pathways the Fukushima poisons take, they will certainly alter the springtime blossoming of Japan’s ocean, starting with the phytoplankton and working up the foodweb.As for the effects on the rest of the world ocean, it’s a matter of how much, how far, and for how long Fukushima’s newborn radionuclides go sailing.
Art and Civil Society in Tokugawa Japan
6 AprWith an extension to graffiti in late 20th Century
I first published this in The Valve back in 2007 under the title “Tokugawa Blogging: Best of 2006.” I’m republishing it here because it relates to the role Transition Teams are playing in moving our societies to a new, more sustainable, and more human way of life.
Back in September of 2006 I was looking through the current issue of Science and saw a book review (requires subscription) entitled “Through Art to Association in Japanese Politics” by one Christena Turner. Given my interest in manga and anime, the title caught my attention. That Science was reviewing a book on such a topic, that really caught my attention. So I read the review, of Bonds of Civility: Aesthetic Networks and the Political Origins of Japanese Culture (Amazon.com) by Eiko Ekegami.
According to Turner, Eikegami argued that
Japanese sociability is characterized by an extensive repertoire of practices for handling the problem of how to interact with strangers. Somewhere between friends and enemies lies the domain of strangers. Somewhere between intimacy and danger lies the domain of civility. “The degree of ‘strangership’ may be an indication of the degree of civility in a given society,” she claims. Civility permits ordinary people to be confident in interactions with those of unknown or different backgrounds, making it possible to form social bonds in the absence of friendship or kinship.
This is important because modern democracies requires a civil realm where individuals can form voluntary associations “outside the realms of both the political institutions of the state and the intimate ties of the family.” Ikegami argued
that networks of people engaged in interactive artistic and cultural pursuits created the bonds of “civility without civil society” that prepared the population of pre-modern Japan for its strikingly rapid transformation into one of the first and most successful modern nations outside of the West. Art created politics when participation in aesthetic networks taught people technologies of association among strangers that eased the transition toward institutions of a modern political economy.
That had me hooked. Not only would this book serve as “deep background” for my interest in manga and anime – “deep” because it’s about a period, roughly 1600 to 1850, well before the emergence of those forms – but it also promised to be a volume that argued for the social value of art on an empirical basis, as opposed to asserting ideals. Since I’d already argued that it was music that made apes into humans, I was eager to read a more empirical, less speculative, argument broadly, if only loosely, consistent with that. Finally, it seemed that Ikegami’s argument might be generally useful in thinking about how social networks function in the larger society.
Predicting the Future, NOT
5 AprBack in the mid-1960s, Dan Gardner reports, Olaf Helmer directed a group of RAND Corporation experts in forecasting the state of this that and the other in the year 2000, which is now well behind us. The following were deemed “very probable”:
Controlled thermonuclear power [fusion power] will be economically competitive with other sources of power.
It will be possible to control the weather regionally to a large extent.
Ocean mining on a large scale will be in progress.
Artificial life will have been created in a test tube.
Immunization against all bacterial and viral diseases will be available.
Highly intelligent machines will exist that will act as effective collaborators of scientists and engineers.
I don’t know about life in a test tube, but, by my lights, none of the others have come to pass. What’s the chance that we can predict the effects of producing more nuclear power plants, more waste, etc.?
Truth and Traditions 