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Gowanus – Big Development Can Wait

31 Jul

Resilience at the margins. Check it out.

Artists and small businesses priced out of other neighborhoods have been taking up residence in the old warehouses. Nightclubs have popped up on streets that taxi repair shops and truck depots once dominated. Restaurants, bars and bakeries have all moved in, creating a scene that longtime Brooklyn residents compare to Dumbo before the multimillion-dollar lofts and Williamsburg before Bedford Avenue became a destination.

Why is it the artists that pioneer these areas? There’s something both obvious and deep there.

via Gowanus – Big Development Can Wait – NYTimes.com.

In the Middle of Glory

31 Jul

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RESOLVED: The Toyota Prius IS NOT a resilient car – Global Guerrillas

30 Jul

RESOLVED: The Toyota Prius IS NOT a resilient car

The Toyota Prius, and electric cars in general, are NOT resilient.

Some major reasons why:

1. Global manufacture. Exotic materials.

2. Replacement and repair. Cost is high and it requires complex methods/parts.

3. Conditional: If electricity isn’t produced locally, there is a dependence on a remote power source.

via RESOLVED: The Toyota Prius IS NOT a resilient car – Global Guerrillas.

Radiation Mitigation – Miiu.org

28 Jul

This is about how to deal with radiation if your world gets irradiated.

In a globally connected world, the bad news is that we cannot “opt out” of radiation poisoning that comes to us via nuclear plant meltdowns or other means. So the question is not how to avoid radiation exposure but how to mitigate it. The good news is that there are some ways to mitigate radiation exposure and by learning about them and adopting some of them into our lifestyle we may find ourselves living more healthy lives even when we do have to ward off the damages of radiation. First, let’s consider the problem.

via Radiation Mitigation – Miiu.org.

While you’re there, check out the whole site. Good stuff there on resilience, localizing, and creating a whole new world “under the radar,” so to speak.

Frank Foster in Buffalo

28 Jul

Frank Foster in Buffalo

At first glance this wouldn’t seem to be about politics. It’s about a musician who was also my teacher. Which is to say, it is very much about politics in the deepest sense. Music is about community, and so is politics. Teaching is about passing knowledge from one generation  to the next, as politics requires. Like politics at its best, it’s about truth and tradition. One of my teachers just died. A great musician, Frank Foster. This is about, and for, him. He knew truth, respected tradition, and made beautiful music, of his time and for the future.

I headed off to the State University of NY at Buffalo (aka UB) in the Fall of 1973. While I was going for my Ph.D. in English Literature, I was also interested in their music offerings—the school’s, not the English Department’s. I’d just gotten my trumpet out of “storage,” as it were, a year or so ago and I decided I wanted to sharpen my jazz chops. So, I looked through the UB catalogue and noticed they had some guy named Frank Foster teaching jazz improv. I’d never heard of him. But, hey, I looked him up anyhow, you never know—played and arranged with Basie, Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan, “hmmm,” says I to my little-too-smart self, “maybe he’ll do.”

He did.

I forget just how I made my way into his improv workshop. While I was registered in the English Department and took courses there, there was no problem about showing up in Frank’s class and just hanging out. I didn’t even register for credit. Just showed up. (Maybe I officially audited the course, as it’s called, but I don’t really remember the arrangement.)

Frank had no problem with that. Neither did anyone else.

So, anyhow, I show up in the room. Other folks came in. We got out our horns and warmed up in that “checkin’ everyone out” way that musicians have. Then Frank comes in—he must’ve, because that’s how it had to be, no? But I don’t actually remember that first day. I remember other days, but not that one. So I’m just makin’ it up about that first day.

Improvising, you might say.

Frank comes in, says ‘hi’ to folks he recognizes. Does some administrative crap, and gets down to business. He goes to the chalk board, writes out the head and changes to a tune, say, “Blue Bossa,” explains a thing or two about “harmonic relevance” (his term) and we’re blowing. The rhythm section has it, we all play the head with Frank. Then Frank takes a chorus or two and then sends it around the room. Everyone took a turn. Continue reading →

How America Could Collapse, No Resilience

27 Jul

US corporations have been “de-localizing” everything, making  the US vulnerable supply chain “shocks” in countries around the world and leaving us bereft of local resilience.

US corporate leaders now see the idea of making things as a cost of doing business, one best left to others. What has happened as a result is that much of the production for critical products and services that make our economy run is constructed by a patchwork global network of suppliers all over the world in unstable regions, over which we have very little control. An accident or political problem in any number of countries may deny us not just iPhones but food, medicine or critical machinery.

Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, has made the case that America needs to be building things here, investing here and manufacturing here. We need the know-how and the ecosystem of innovation. The more corporate America seeks to push production risk off the balance sheet onto an increasingly fragile global supply chain, the more it seeks to wound the state so there is no body that can constrain its worst impulses, the more likely we will see a truly devastating Lehman-style industrial supply shock.

via How America Could Collapse | The Nation.

That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner

26 Jul

We can get more food out of the plants we raise as food crops, thereby making better use out of the biomass.

If home cooks reconsidered what should go into the pot, and what into the trash, what would they find? What new flavors might emerge, what old techniques? Pre-industrial cooks, for whom thrift was a necessity as well as a virtue, once knew many ways to put the entire garden to work. Fried green tomatoes and pickled watermelon rind are examples of dishes that preserved a bumper crop before rot set in.

“Some people these days are so unfamiliar with vegetables in their natural state, they don’t even know that a broccoli stalk is just as edible as the florets,” said Julia Wylie, an organic farmer in Watsonville, Calif.

via That’s Not Trash, That’s Dinner – NYTimes.com.

Change the World

26 Jul

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.

—Margaret Mead

Murdoch’s 12 ‘Gifts’ to the World

25 Jul

Salon has an article on 12 things the Murdoch has done to make the world a poorer place for you and me:

  1. He has transformed world politics for the worse: It was George W. Bush’s first cousin (John Ellis), working as head of Murdoch’s Fox News election night “decision desk,” who, during the Florida voting uncertainties, called the election for Bush and set off a chain reaction from other media.
  2. He has ridiculed and raised doubts about global catastrophes, and about science itself, while elevating absurd theories and hyping minor matters.
  3. He has undermined liberty: His outlets led the drumbeat for restriction or elimination of certain fundamental rights, … while at the same time … fueling panic justifying the buildup of the national surveillance state.
  4. He has turned the public against the press.
  5. He has simultaneously propagandized for “the law” and compromised it.
  6. He has undermined essential rules about propriety in the news business, degrading ethical walls put in place through long tradition.
  7. He has propagandized for many of society’s worst instincts.
  8. He has until now effectively neutralized many would-be critics in journalism.
  9. He has relentlessly applied a double standard: Long a vilifier of others as communist sympathizers, he has created a pragmatic, but cynical partnership with the Chinese communist party dictators that has benefited him financially without helping (in fact, in some ways hindering) the prospects of democracy and freedom in that country.
  10. He has dumbed down the news business and hence the public.
  11. He has used his wealth regularly to stave off businesses and individuals that his company has illegally damaged.
  12. His campaign contributions and the public support of his media organizations have persuaded politicians to override laws against media monopolies. And with each successive step, his growing dominance made the following step in building an empire easier to achieve

The Tables Are Turned on Rupert Murdoch – NYTimes.com

20 Jul

Although I generally admire entrepreneurs who build giant companies, Rupert Murdoch, despite giving us Homer Simpson, generally has not been a force for good over the course of his long career. His Bill O’Reilly-ed, Glenn Beck-ed Fox News has done a great deal to coarsen the political discourse. His tabloids have lowered the standards of journalism on three continents — and routinely broken the law on at least one of them. He had dumbed down his prestige papers, like The Times of London. He has run roughshod over cross-ownership rules meant to prevent one man or company from having too much power — and then used his lobbying might to get those rules diluted. He has put kowtowing to China ahead of freedom of the press, even killing a book set to be published by his HarperCollins unit that the Chinese authorities objected to. He has consistently used his media properties to reward allies and punish enemies. It’s a long list.

via The Tables Are Turned on Rupert Murdoch – NYTimes.com.

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