Archive | August, 2011

How Resilient is the Internet?

28 Aug

I live in Jersey City, NJ, not too far from the waterfront (Hudson River / New York harbor). I’ve been glued to the internet getting up dated information about Irene.

Now, one of the power generating stations in JC has been flooded. They’re closing down for emergency repairs. But I’ve still got power. But if my power goes out . . .

No internet for me.

It’s clear to me that the internet needs to be entirely off the main power grid. I don’t know what that means, technically. If I had a small solar generator & bettery back-up sufficient for my lap-top, that would get my machine off the grid. But, is there wifi in my area? I don’t know, but probably should. If so, is it independent of the main power grid? Don’t know.

But what I do know is that the whole thing, ends-to-ends, needs to be OFF THE GRID.

I’d like to think that the Defense Department has made their communications independent of the main power grid. If anyone has the means and the motive, they do. But we ALL need to be independent of that grid.

Does America Need Manufacturing? – NYTimes.com

27 Aug

If America wants to stay competitive in the world of green energy technologies, it will have to invest in local facilities for manufacturing those technologies. They are not so easy to off-shore as software and services.

“Now I think we’re at a really different moment,” Berger says. “We’re seeing a wave of new technologies, in energy, biotechnology, batteries, where there has to be a closer integration between research, development, design, product definition and production.”

One challenge to moving in this direction may be that our banks, hedge funds and venture capitalists are geared toward investing in financial instruments and software companies. In such endeavors, even modest investments can yield extraordinarily quick and large returns. Financing brick-and-mortar factories, by contrast, is expensive and painstaking and offers far less potential for speedy returns. Berger maintains that for the economy to get “full value” from our laboratories’ ideas in energy or biotech — not just new company headquarters but industrial jobs too — we must aspire to a different business model than the one we have come to admire.

via Does America Need Manufacturing? – NYTimes.com.

Obama Says He Just Found Out How Bad the Economy Was in 2008, Where Is the Ridicule? | Beat the Press

27 Aug

Either Obama was asleep at the wheel or he’s ‘misremembering’ what he and his team knew back then. In either case, it’s not pretty.

The Post should have included the comments of economists ridiculing the idea that President Obama has just now discovered how bad the downturn was. It might even be worth a separate article or two. If the statement is actually true (i.e. President Obama just realized how bad the downturn was) then it is deserving of far more attention than his comment about working class whites being bitter and clinging to gun and religion before the Pennsylvania primary.

via Obama Says He Just Found Out How Bad the Economy Was in 2008, Where Is the Ridicule? | Beat the Press.

Why Is That a Secret? Or: The Paranoid Presidency— NYTimes.com

27 Aug

Just WHAT are they hiding?

The Obama administration has misguidedly used the Espionage Act in five such cases of news media disclosures; previously there were no more than four in all of White House history. This comes as officials classified nearly 77 million documents last year — a one-year jump of 40 percent. The government claim that this was because of improved reporting is not reassuring.

via Why Is That a Secret? – NYTimes.com.

A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now | Common Dreams

26 Aug

This is a perfect time for a cooperative economy. Considering the disproportionate struggles faced by women and people of color during a recession, the cooperative economy presents an opportunity for all people, to leverage more power by making themselves the bosses, sharing ownership, and taking a collective approach to good management. Many people have already been let down by a top-down corporate or non-profit model in a recession-ridden society. Now is the time to rebuild the system, and build a society founded on justice, dignity, and respect for people and the planet.

via A Cooperative Economy: The Time Is Now | Common Dreams.

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For Hurricane Irene

26 Aug

I say let’s serenade the lady. Here’s the Weavers singing “Goodnight Irene” at their Carnegie Hall reunion concert.

Maybe the lady will here us, maybe she won’t. But we’ll feel better.

Still, get outa’ town if you’re living on low wet ground. Otherwise, lay in supplies and stay safe.

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Complex Grace

26 Aug

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Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial – NYTimes.com

26 Aug

America’s four catastrophes: militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty:

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

via Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial – NYTimes.com.

Salvation, Democracy, and Localism

25 Aug

This is a revised version of an article I originally published in Buffalo Report in March 2005.

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Salvation and Democracy, or How One’s Personal Relationship with Christ Underwrites Governmental Legitimacy

In the immediate wake of the 2004 Presidential election there was a lot of earnest talk about the role of religion and morality in the election and more generally in contemporary American political life. The early word was that unless the Democrats get religion, they’re finished. While that talk has abated somewhat, the issue of religion in our political life remains with us.

What makes this particularly perplexing is that, while American culture is largely derived from Europe, Europeans are not nearly so religious. Thus a 1993 Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans attended church weekly as compared to 14 percent for the British, 12 percent French, and 4 percent Swedes. Not only is America more religious than Europe, but revivalism has been important throughout American history from the Colonial period through the present.

This question interests me, in the first place, because, in some measure I am a standard issue secular humanist who finds the European situation more compatible with a simple, perhaps naive, belief that human progress involves the advance of reason. I find the question a pressing one because of the current political situation. It is not simply that fundamentalism has been on the rise for the past two or three decades, but that it seems captive to some of the most destructive forces in contemporary American politics. And yet . . .

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The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues < Killing the Buddha

25 Aug

West calls himself a libertarian, but he’s not the kind who mistakes selfishness for wisdom, the fool who knowingly declares “I got mine and tough luck for you if you don’t.” Libertarianism, in West’s view, is a collective affair. The chains that bind the slave also entrap the slave owner; the prison of poverty requires the affluent to act as wardens. We’re all locked in a box together—and that means that we can only win our freedom to be individuals together. Both slave and slave-owner must free one another and themselves from the framework of slavery, the rigid structures of thought—the matrix, a term present in West’s work long before the movies—that prevent us from imagining a better way of being.

via The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues < Killing the Buddha.

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