The arts of the possible
Politics, said Bismarck, is the art of the possible. Yet we are living in a time when politics as widely practised is quite the reverse: the art and worship of the Impossible, namely of the impossible dream of fostering infinite greed, infinite accumulation, infinite “growth,” on a finite planet; of fighting infinite war to control finite and dwindling fossil reserves… Politics today is defined by the futile and stupid dream of impermeable borders, by an obsession with micro-control and hypersurveillance, with Enclosure at every level from the land to the air to the arts, with an hubristic conceit of totalitarian control of the biosphere itself. And it is conducted in large part by the kind of people who can speak, with a straight face, of “the reality-based community” as someone other than themselves — and of “the environment” as if it were something separate from themselves, and expendable by comparison with really important (imaginary) things like money profit, compound interest, national borders, and so on. Politics these days is the art of imagining, promoting, defending, and trying desperately to enforce the Impossible.
So resistance, these days, seems to be the reclamation of the Arts of the Possible, our desperate last-minute search for exit doors from the Empire of the Impossible that surrounds us. We are trying to reclaim, more than anything, possibility itself: the possibility of a continuity of human culture and human life, in face of massive momentum towards the impossibility of survival. We are trying to imagine and adopt possible ways of life. Trying to assert a “life-wish” against the strong current of what seems almost like a civilisational death-wish. Trying to assert the claims of reality, counter to the Culture — as D Jensen has it — of Make-Believe.
What is and is not possible, seems more and more our contested turf. Accusations of “impracticality” or “impossibility” are bandied about whenever reform, reparations, repentance, repair are proposed. Recently I read this jaw-dropper in the Independent:
A seismic shift in thinking is needed, according to senior researcher Erik Assadourian, project director of the report: “Making policy and technology changes while keeping cultures centred on consumerism and growth can only go so far. To thrive long into the future, human societies must shift their cultures so sustainability becomes the norm.”
But the report’s findings were attacked last night by Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “Let’s face it, by 2050, the combined population of China and India alone will have grown to three billion. By then, most Chinese and Indians will have adopted an urban lifestyle. This… makes demands for radical curbs in consumerism and CO2 emissions utterly unrealistic.”
[emphasis mine]
The most reputable science we have is warning us in no uncertain terms that continuing to emit CO2 at present levels amounts to civilisational suicide; and yet we can still speak of radical carbon reduction as “unrealistic” and be taken seriously, even quoted in newspapers of record. It is still a respectable position to take in public, to insist that the changes we need to make in order to survive are simply Not Possible.
The borders of what is Officially Possible constrain what can be seriously discussed, what can be seriously proposed, what can occupy the fleeting attention span of mass media, what politicians are allowed to say, what individuals are allowed to think. It is not possible, we are told, to meet our energy “needs” from sustainable sources. It is not possible to rethink or reduce our energy “needs”. It is not possible to feed ourselves without factory monoculture farming. It is not possible to achieve a binding CO2 emissions reduction treaty. It is not possible to reform our commercial and banking systems. It is not possible to feed the hungry. It is not possible to stop fighting wars. It is not possible to pry one more scrap of privilege from the clutch of the ruling classes, not possible to raise taxes, not possible to open borders, not possible to provide basic health care, not possible…
… when all the time, what is clearly not possible is to go on as we are. Hence, the deep defiance, the deep subversiveness of the World Social Forum slogan, Another World Is Possible.
I therefore submit for discussion the Arts of the Possible: a random handful of recently-encountered reality-based documents, just a few things people have done (are doing) that have worked, however locally and for however long, to increase the possibilities for our collective survival, for some increase in justice, for some reduction of suffering, for some augmentation of sanity — for the life of the soil, the river, the forest, the ocean, the prairie, the farm, the biosphere, for our own lives and prospects — a few momentarily successful interventions on the side of life.
Organic Agriculture as a Carbon Capture Strategy
Food Quality and Public Health
Not just in S America but in the US!
Learning by Doing: Local Food Councils and Food Security, US
LivingFutures and Teal Farm: a case study in “sustainability”
Strawberries and Land Reform in California: From Farmworkers to Landowners
Possible Agriculture in Malawi
The Transition Initiative: Townships preparing for Peak Oil
Practical Experience with Car-Free Cities
Learning in the Real World: Freeing Kids from the Regimented Classroom
Challenging the Culture of Overwork
The Mondragon Collectives: history, business model, success stories
A Local Currency with a Track Record: The Salt Spring Dollar
Populist microfunding of a high-vis film project
Elinor Ostrom, defender of the “well-governed commons”, receives a Nobel
Reality-Oriented Economics starting to make itself heard
We Don’t Always Lose: How the Haida saved their homeland from exterminist logging
The Actual Does not Exhaust the Real
Life wants to live. Life so completely wants to live. And to the degree that we ourselves are alive, and to the degree that we consider ourselves among and allied with the living, our task is clear: to help life live.
This is what is possible. In the end, this is all that is really possible; when we set ourselves up in opposition to and enmity with all that lives, the end result is a cultural and political trajectory arcing out into the unsurvivable Impossible. If there is a cultural task for our time, perhaps it is to push as hard as we can for the tipping point at which the people and projects I’ve linked to above are not seen as ‘impractical dreamers’ or ‘well-meaning idealists’ but as hard-headed practitioners of the Arts of the Possible, contending valiantly with a failing, flailing culture of delusion, fantasy, and petulant denial.
juannie:
God, thank you De. This is exactly what we need and what I was asking for the other day.
Quote:
“When people get caught up in humiliating abuse syndromes, more truths about their oppressive humiliations don’t set them free. What sets them free is morale.
What gives people morale? Encouragement. Small victories. Models of courageous behaviors. And anything that helps them break out of the vicious cycle of pain, shut down, immobilization, shame over immobilization, more pain, and more shut down. ” from Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free? By BRUCE E. LEVINE
We are inundated on a daily basis with the horrors surrounding us that portend our impending demise. We know the problems and so do the psyche’s of most of us even those still in denial. But for most of us suffering from abuse syndromes imposed by the dominators, these stories only push us deeper into humiliation, feelings of hopelessness and further denial.
There are possibilities that are being implemented even as we speak and we have to find them and become involved.
Jensen believes that civilization is totally irredeemable and our job is to hasten it’s downfall, to “take it down”. I would amend that by saying that the best and maybe only way to break a bad habit is to replace it with something positive, thus obsoleting it. I am sure this will work on the humanity wide habit of civilization as well as personal habits.
You have offered exactly what I was hoping for, a list of opportunities and successes to inspire not to further traumatize.
I wish to respond further but will be totally out of commission for at least a week to ten days after surgery today. I hope to see this thread filled with further developments of this theme. Until then I wish you all well and will be looking forward to my return here.
14 January 2010, 7:51 am(Boer) Tom:
A comment about comments – if one wishes to inform people, one must gather the courage to go to speak to them, e.g. on the WEB 2.0 message boards of various online magazines. Prepare the message for the audience – is it an audience that is e.g. cognizant of global warming, or one in denial? If the latter, explain how the economics of oil (e.g. tapping into Canadian tar sands as the economy strengthens drives up the price of oil to the point of failure, which then causes a weakening of the economy, and less tar sands oil is needed – the price goes down again) and uranium prevents meaningful economy. Makes the presentation sufficiently clear – on comment boards – and be sympathetic (while firm) in one’s replies to disbelievers. Give references. And put all the critical points in the first post, if possible – don’t initially give people false hope of defeating the argument. Also give meaningful links, e.g. the above – hate to use a war analogy, but Sun Tzu says always leave an opening for escape
One must put as much effort into such a (set of) forum comment(s) as one would for an article for the magazine. Add marginal (to the message) details e.g. of the collapse of the fisheries, with information on how UV breaks down the plastics into tiny pieces that then absorb heavy metals and other toxins, and become ‘poison pills’ to fish – give your audience a sense of urgency, without overly betraying your own sense of urgency – demand simply acceptance of the facts, e.g. by giving a hyperlink for each claim.
My first such comment took several hours to prepare… It becomes faster with time. Also, you might have to read some junk articles and/or books that deny these various crises, to develop some short counter-points, link/reference farms for these counter-points etc. for countering the denials – remember to test your counter-points on such individuals (they often have their own blogs – even if they moderate you away, they do read your comment, and their subsequent behavior will betray whether it worked or not, or whether they are simply pathological liars.
14 January 2010, 10:59 amDeAnander:
@Juannie I guess it’s a few hours too late to wish you luck w/the medical drama, but I look forward to your return and hope it goes well.
14 January 2010, 12:53 pmDeAnander:
Another data point:
The theme is consistent and recurring: the failure of the reductionist worldview (in the long run, which we’re coming to) and the urgent necessity of “systems-based” (technomanagerial-speak) or connected and connective thinking. Nothing is separate from anything else. As Feynman said, “Nothing is ‘mere’.” As Campbell said, “You can’t do just one thing.” This is where reductionist thinking parts company with reality, and as with most navigational error… a small initial deviation pursued consistently and long enough leads to a very different destination.
And now I’m off on a wild riff…
We don’t need to indulge in romantic (and patronising) Disneyfication of aboriginal cultures to realise a couple of good hard facts about those folkways: 1) many of them were adapted over millennia to ensure the survival and happiness of people dealing with scarcity and adverse conditions. (Which is where we’re headed when the brief fossil binge is over, so maybe we should take some notes.) 2) the best and brightest of our leading-edge researchers are telling us, in very techno-analytical terms, what the ancestors have been telling traditional peoples for those same millennia: we are all connected. The life of the ocean, forest and soil is our life. The sun is the source of all life. You cannot take more than is replaceable: respect for your animal neighbours ensures your longterm survival, which is tied intimately to theirs. They are also your family.
The forest is the salmon, the salmon are the forest. When we trace the path of N15 into riparian environments in the NW, we discover (gee whiz) that the salmon, the bear, and the forest are all one food-web; that the rivers and oceans are one environment; that the river, creek, tree, bear, salmon (and by implication herring and plankton, berry bushes and mushrooms, mycelium and algae) are all one food-web. We also discover that the Salish and Tsimshian and Haida and hundreds of other language groups knew this all along, by patient observation and adaptation over thousands of years; they didn’t have electron microscopy and mass spectrometers but they knew and remembered what they saw, generation after generation. With our microscopes, computers, and vaunted “western rationalism” we confirm what they’ve “always” known (having figured it out so long ago): life on earth is interconnected, interdependent, symbiotic, vastly complex — not isolated, purely competitive, merely chemical, and mechanically simple.
Sanity — individual or cultural — might well be defined as a realistic awareness of that complexity, and a salutary caution in dealing with it.
The delicate balance of sanity in human cultures is easily derailed, as Jared Diamond, Clive Ponting, and Joseph Tainter have pointed out at length. The balance of sanity in the NW first nations was derailed by the alien ships that arrived loaded with unimaginable instant wealth, superior firepower, and novel wildly addictive substances like alcohol and refined sugar. Chiefs whose worldview traditionally forbade looting their environment were quickly “made insane” by first contact and persuaded to join the first great exterminist project (liquidating the fur seals). That’s a long story, too long and too complicated to delve into in a Comment; whole books have been written about it. I think the main point may be that the balance of cultural sanity can be derailed — corrupted — by a sudden influx of easy wealth — maybe somewhat the same story as a yeast colony suddenly hypertrophying due to a big nutrient hit.
The initial easy conquests of an early empire seem to have some of the same intoxicating effect; I suspect that the huge influx of gold and silver looted from the “New World” derailed what commonsense was left in European culture at the dawn of the industrial revolution, and that the subsequent bonanza of fossil fuels (coal and then oil) finished the job — producing the bizarre cultural bloom on whose decay-slope we are now living. At any rate it seems long past time to synthesize as best we can the wisdom of the ancestors with the impressive techKnowHow of our current age, if we wish to preserve any continuity or amenity in our collective life and not go the way of the Ik or the people of Rapa Nui.
14 January 2010, 2:28 pmrootlesscosmo:
I’d like to peer more closely at two phrases in DeAnander’s post:
civilisational suicide
and
what is clearly not possible is to go on as we are
My misgivings about “Another world is possible” can be expressed by observing that another world is, strictly speaking, inevitable; what’s in question is whether it will be a better one, for some agreed definition of “better.” It seems to me that “realists” like Peiser have no trouble acknowledging that “to go on as we are” isn’t an option; his argument, as I understand it, is that a probable future that includes three billion urbanized people in China and India is a more powerful constraint on discussion than the clumsy gatekeeping of the official gatekeepers. (The Independent and this blog aren’t in the mainstream, but we’re not being locked up for expressing dissenting views.) Life not only wants to live, it manages to go on living, even if the civilizations it accretes are transient; call this suicide or evolution by punctuated equilibrium, the name is less important than that we try to establish what the limits of the possible really are. I generally agree with the Edward Gorey character’s cry of alarm: “Things do not get better, but worse!” But is this really news? Was not even Bismarck over-optimistic?
14 January 2010, 5:40 pmDeAnander:
I am always glad to have you peering more closely at my text, mon cher rootless… keeps me on my toes!
I guess I question whether there is any *probable* future that includes 3 bio people — anywhere — living in fossil-fueled urban cores… any probable future longer than, say 25 years ahead. In the short term the existence of this social organisation and resource usage pattern is entrenched — like automobile dependency — and does militate against change; but it seems one of the most fragile of human habitation patterns and — possibly — the first to collapse when energy gets expensive, climate catastrophes increase in frequency, and food insecurity becomes more widespread.
If we concede, which I think we probably must, that urban concentrations can only exist by draining surplus (or even essential) resources from a rural, productive hinterland (the book Imperial San Francisco comes to mind here), concentrating resources and power in the hands of the urbanised and exporting toxicity and trash to the periphery again, then they are — like the empires of which they’re the larval phase — the showy efflorescence of surplus productivity in the rural periphery. What happens when/if the periphery no longer produces a surplus (due to degradation of the biosphere and climate destabilisation) and/or the cost of transport from the expanding periphery to the core becomes punitive? Diamond’s and Tainter’s accounts of the collapse of sophisticated urban cores in the past suggests that they are quite fragile wrt to fluctuations in resource flow.
The process of depopulating the countryside (minimising competition for the resources to be drained into cities and maximising the pool of persons totally dependent on the money economy for subsistence, i.e. desperate labour) is almost complete in the industrial nations, and the result has been to make agriculture less productive per hectare (and per gallon of irrigation water) than, say, Asian peasant farming; and to make agriculture utterly and pathetically dependent on the same fossil inputs that are growing scarcer and more expensive. In other words, the concentration of people and resources in the urban cores has produced a more tenuous, less robust food system, and is very expensive (in energy) to maintain. “Fragile” is the word that keeps coming to mind. To produce food sustainably, reducing carbon emissions and fossil inputs, conserving rather than mining soil, conserving water, etc., requires a giant step away from industrial monoculture and towards a more labour-intensive, intelligent polyculture; and I suspect that means needing more than 2 percent of the population working the land.
I am not at all sure that the core/periphery relation can be maintained in a resource-scarce world, or at least not on the grandiose/extreme scale that we are accustomed to. The urban efflorescence of rural surpluses will have to shrink if the surpluses get smaller. People seem to have a recurring, termite-like drive to build cities, and I suspect we will always have them… but the scale of today’s cities — like the scale of many other things we do — seems to me a product of cheap fossil energy, artifact of an era already passing. Heck, we’ve built “modern” office and residential towers where there’s no air circulation w/o electric fans (windows don’t even open), no adequate lighting w/o electric light, and very few human beings (particularly sedentary urban office workers) are capable of climbing stairs to the 40th floor so if the electric elevators are not working, the upper storeys are uninhabitable. How smart was that? Wonderful conspicuous-consumption trophy statement, very poor long-term design decision
Visionaries are already proposing the self-sufficient cities of the future — buildings that would generate their own energy, compost their own waste, incorporate vertical greenhouse farms, filter and recycle their own water, use natural lighting and ventilation. They sound marvelous. They would be a whole new departure for humanity — cities that do not depend on a colonial-model relationship with an exploited periphery. Truly, a radical departure. Let’s hope that we are not already out of time to build them…
15 January 2010, 1:28 amcatlady:
I’ve just finished reading Kingsolver’s wonderful Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which seems to fit here.
Another inspiration: a couple of weeks ago, the Willamette Weekly included a short blurb titled “Goats are the new chickens,” explaining that in Portland, OR, folks can keep up to 3 pygmy goats in their (well-enclosed) backyards. I’m going to be looking for a suitable backyard in the next year.
15 January 2010, 12:43 pmLisa:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8
Updated with Slides – Lord Christopher Monckton Speaking in St. Paul
On the Global Warming scam
18 January 2010, 6:24 pmStan:
You’re kidding, right?
18 January 2010, 6:58 pmLisa:
Michael Coren with Lord Christopher Monckton – part 3
18 January 2010, 7:03 pmhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cCxdT6Trko&NR=1
Stan:
FULL
FULL
FULL
Is there a reason you’re linking us to this crackpot, Lisa?
19 January 2010, 8:10 amLisa:
Information. Other viewpoints. His critique of Al Gore is good. There are scientists who disagree with the global warming perspective. Not all are crackpots and shills for industry. Global warming is a useful political tool as well for the elites, so it is wise to keep an open mind. I don’t see Monckton as a “crackpot.” That typology doesn’t quite fit him. Chossudovsky’s site has also published “skeptical” material regarding what has been termed the “global warming hysteria”; I don’t think Chossudovsky is a “crackpot” either. Personally, I have no certitude regarding either position; I have not researched it enough, and I am not a climatologist. I think industrialism and rampant corporate capitalism and third world debt do quite enough damage to the environment and to people without adding or substracting global warming concerns.
19 January 2010, 4:50 pmDeAnander:
QUOTE
/QUOTE
19 January 2010, 7:09 pmDmitry Orlov: The Despotism of the Image
DeAnander:
Senior activism: Green Granny on agricultural reform:
19 January 2010, 7:35 pmJon:
Climate Change: This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of our Generation
Stan,
Ad hominem attacks on a position are not a proper intellectual argument. Monckton may be whatever you please, but what counts is whether on the questions he is right or wrong. I have read a number of articles at globalresearch.ca and at lewrockwell.com written by serious people saying that it is not evident or certain scientifically that anthropogenic causes are behind global warming, or even that global warming is actually occuring as a long term cycle. It’s actually a very complex issue. You are not a climatologist, nor are you a scientist. Your position is respected and respectable, but don’t make a religion out of it. You just might be wrong. We don’t know everything–not by a long shot.
Below are some of the titles of articles I found at globalresearch.ca–are they all “fringe” authors? Are they all in the pockets of corporate interests? Are they all liars, in other words? I doubt it. Conversely, there seems to be a fair amount of data that could point to corporate and financial and political interest are behind the push for global warming. It’s a great tool to achieve global control. But as regards the science of the position, there does not seem yet to be any conclusive evidence such that it would have lead to a consensus.
———————————————-
“Catastrophic Global Warming”, Ecological Brainwashing and World Government
There Is No ‘Consensus’ On Global Warming
A clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition
Global Warming ‘Hysteria’
What Global Warming?
Global Cooling is Here
19 January 2010, 9:13 pmEvidence for Predicting Global Cooling for the Next Three Decades
Stan:
Monckton’s prevarications about his credientials and background are a matter of record. As to his arguments, and whether one needs to be a credentialed climatologist to understand or refute them, this is an appeal to authority. My attacks are ad hominem because the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is so overwhelming that Monckton does not deserve or require a detailed rebuttal. Cockburn and the late Michael Crichton are/were climate change “skeptics,” and at least they cannot be said to have taken money from oil companies.
Alex Cockburn is an avowed lefist, hardly a corporate supporter, but then the vast majority of leftists – themselves with no axe to grind for moneyed interests – disagree with AC.
Yes, there are scientists who have dissented from the consensus, but their numbers are very small and their arguments convoluted and arcane. To simply state that scientists dissent is disingenuous. The consensus matters. Globalization Research is not a scientific body, but an unabashedly polemical one. That doesn’t make them right or wrong; but again, when they take the contrarian view on a scientific matter, they need to refute the consensus… which they haven’t done obviously. That consensus has only grown stronger with time.
Atmospheric carbon levels right now are higher than they have been for 650,000 years, at 380 ppm. This is a demonstrably heat-trapping gas. The dynamics are complex, but the overall trend is unmistakable, and deniable only out of sheer perversity. We don’t know what the consequences will be, but it’s as sure a bet as you could want that there are and will continue to be consequences when we keep pouring more carbon on, while we simultaneously chop down forests.
That this scinetific consensus is being used by capitalist apologists to sell cap and trade schemes, et al, to the public does not mean the science is wrong.
19 January 2010, 10:32 pmDeAnander:
“Are they all in the pockets of corporate interests?”
Well, them’s mighty big pockets. There’s enough room for everybody:
Now, about those articles.
“Ecological Brainwashing” article by Olga Chetverikova, who writes for “Strategic Culture Foundation” — much of whose content promotes the Russian and Ukrainian oil and natural gas industry as providers of “Energy of the Future”. Hmm, unbiased? And what are her credentials?
“There is no ‘consensus’ on global warming” by Richard Lindzen via the Wall Street Journal, not exactly an unbiased source. Here’s a page on Lindzen including the dollar amounts of fees and retainers received from the oil industry.
I assume “Global Warming ‘Hysteria’” is the article by Paul Joseph Watson of Prisonplanet and other conspiracy fanzines. Not a climatologist by a long shot, and apparently never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like.
Don J Easterbrook (“Global Cooling is Here”) is at least a credentialled scientist, though he’s an older professor emeritus perhaps not quite in touch with the cutting edge of research. That doesn’t necessarily make him unreliable — Frank Deffeyes was well on in years when he wrote “Hubbert’s Peak”. His background however is in geology, not climatology. The international scientific consensus is so strong at present that Easterbrook is most likely regarded as an elderly crank (I used to work in Big Science and have some experience of how scientists talk about one another off the record); he’s a “sunspot” fan, which is not the prevailing view of climatic variation. Of the articles listed here, he seems to be the only author with no ties to the oil industry.
“What Global Warming?” presumably refers to the boilerplate rant from Phil Brennan, who’s just another wingnut talking head, loyally keeping the echo chamber booming. Can’t GlobalResearch do better than that?
BTW “Jon” — any fool with an internet connection and Google can check on the backgrounds of these authors and publications just as quickly as I did. With the possible exception of Easterbrook, they hardly qualify as “serious people”. And if your own intention is “serious,” why present the articles as titles only, with no author attribution and no link? Afraid they wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny?
“They just make these things up”
And then the echo chamber repeats them all over the internet.
19 January 2010, 10:40 pmJon:
Re: “Afraid they wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny?”
Don’t be silly. I said they all came from globalresearch.ca. I have no idea if they “stand up to scrutiny.” I offered them as views that apparently differed from the supporters of global warming. I do not claim to be an expert on these matters, as apparently you think you are–as you seem to be on almost everything you care to opine on.
Stan, your comment regarding the argument of authority makes no sense. Knowledge is a kind of authority, by definition; it’s the kind of authority I had in mind. Also you dismiss a person for working for industry. FW Engdahl, for example–hardly a fool–does not “believe” in peak oil. He also notes that peak oil advocates are often oil industry representatives or employees. Does that in itself make them wrong? I personally have no certitude about peak oil, although admittedly the economic argument that the second half of the deposits are going to be increasingly expensive to extract until a point of non-profitability is reached, seems very strong. I am no expert in the geological facts, however, not even well read in them.
Now, as to global warming, I defer–for the time being–to your apparently greater knowledge of it. I just don’t like name calling, nor do I like the kind of quasi-religious intolerance that sometimes seems to color your blog on certain issues. Like Lisa, I personally have no certitude regarding either position; I have not researched it enough, and I am not a climatologist. I don’t feel I can contribute much light to the subject, and don’t feel like contributing any heat.
19 January 2010, 11:33 pmStan:
It’s a blog, an issues blog, and what people do here is opine. One of the oft stated purposes of this blog is to break down intellectual divisions of labor (as the name suggests), based on the belief that anyone can become more expert, with or without institutional credentials. However, one of the less exlplicit notions behind it is to employ an element of intellectual rigor, our own peer reviews if you like.
Hafta head to San Jose for fingerprinting, so I’ll opine more later.
20 January 2010, 7:06 amxenia:
Let’s put it this way: Even if oil were more abundant, should it be exploited to the last drop? Isn’t the pollution of the planet horrendous enough? Apparently not.
I have not yet seen an argument against peak oil which was not based on a selfish hope that one can drive one’s car for all eternity without feeling bad about it.
20 January 2010, 2:04 pmm.c.:
What do Martha Coakley, Ned Lamont, & Michael Dukakis have in common? There are all eggheads who took two week or more vacations with big leads in the polls only to lose badly. Those two votes in the Senate might have come in mighty handy about now….
20 January 2010, 4:27 pmld:
I think Stan gets it more or less right here. Just because investment banks, eco-entrepreneurs, and other assorted green capitalists want to steer phony AGW “solutions” to their own ends, does not mean that AGW is a colossal hoax. And yes, there is a strong scientific consensus in favor of AGW. However, I do think Stan understates the extent to which there is a profound disagreement over the pacing and the impact of AGW effects, precisely because the climate system is so complex and changes are interactive, non-linear, and unpredictable. But precisely because the exact effects are unknown and unknowable, it’s best to bear the “precautionary principle” in mind. And as others here have noted, there are other myriad reasons to oppose the ways in which the accumulation imperative incinerates fossil fuels, destroys carbon sinks, etc. Still, it’s best for eco-localists to always keep their “sociology of science” toolkit at the ready.
20 January 2010, 6:11 pmDeAnander:
It’s hard for a doctor to predict exactly when or how (or if) any individual person will die prematurely from smoking cigarettes. Yet there’s a strong consensus that cigarette addiction is pathogenic. Few people would write off the entire body of medical research on nicotine addiction, lung cancer, emphysema, bladder cancer and related syndromes because the doc could not say precisely at what age, and from what, an individual smoker is likely to die.
Yet climate change denialists (or obfuscators) are constantly sniping at IPCC, claiming that a scientific consensus — about as strong as the one on the pathogenicity of heavy smoking — is meaningless because of the absence of precise predictive power in modelling chaotic systems. Because the doc can’t tell you that you will keel over from lung cancer exactly 2 weeks after your 50th birthday if you don’t quit, doesn’t mean that smoking is harmless or that medical science is all BS. And because the climatologists are not sure in exactly what ways, or in what year or decade, the climate will respond to destabilisation due to CO2 buildup, doesn’t mean that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is harmless and the science can be ignored. They know what the general picture is — the destabilised climate will respond one way or another, probably non-linearly — and it’s not reassuring.
I do wish people would pay attention to the funding behind the noise machine (the manufactured doubt industry) — Monbiot’s investigative journalism on this topic is fascinating in a deeply disturbing way. The retooling of the tobacco lobby’s PR campaign, almost plug-n-play, only the content changed; even the same PR firms, exactly the same techniques. They don’t have to refute, they don’t have to prove or disprove; all they have to do is muddy the waters and produce a state of doubt or confusion sufficient to short-circuit any sense of urgency. That’s all their clients need in order to be allowed by public opinion to continue business as usual.
It would take a really big, really long-running conspiracy to account for all of current climate research as a Trilateralist (or whatever) Plot.
If we’re looking for conspiracies, what about the conspiracy of industrialists and politicians to muzzle climate scientists, bankroll the manufacture of doubt, promote utter nonsense like “cap and trade,” etc?
If we’re hunting conspiracies, what about the Bush White House assault on the US scientific establishment, which manifested itself on several fronts but particularly in the censorship of scientific reports on climate change and CO2 emissions? Were the Bush gang bravely defending the common people from the byzantine Climate Conspiracy? Or were they just, like others in the denial industry, defending the interests of ordinary fossil-fueled capitalists against any realities that might interfere with next quarter’s profits? We hardly need complicated conspiracy theories when we have the basic ingredients of greed, self-interest, and enormous pots of money and political influence…
20 January 2010, 11:45 pmStan:
An ad hominem argument is only an ad hominem fallacy if the ad hominem stands alone, and not as part of a larger evidentiary pattern to which it lends support.
I am thinking here now of the spokespersons for the DoD who are part of the Rendon/Lincoln-style disinformation apparatus for the war, who might claim that any critique of them which included their personal bios – ie, their former employment as PR hacks in other disinformation campaigns – is an ad hominem attack.
21 January 2010, 6:34 amm.c.:
Slightly off-topic but maybe entertaining is the hypothesis that both World Wars were fought at least partly over control of OIL. WWII for example: US, USSR, UK, all had easy access to oil. Germany, Italy, & Japan did not. Why was the German army in North Africa & in the mountains of the southern Soviet Union? Not only to cut off the British oil supply but to fuel their own war machine. Japan invaded Mongolia & Indochina for natural resouces. China lost both ways. The electric car was toyed about with about 100 years ago but to no avail & I’m sure everyone has seen the film “Tucker” with Jeff Bridges….
21 January 2010, 12:40 pmStan:
Blitzkreig was the first systematic use of mechanized offensive warfare. It ran on gasoline, and energy for the factories. Much moreso now, with the US DoD being the biggest energy consuming entity in the world. Fighting for the oil to fight is now on the horizon as the end-paradox of hydrocarbon Homo sapien (question mark by sapien).
The great hidden negentropic expenditure is the modern American soldier, who – as an individual – is now a walking, talking, energy super-sink. Take all the consumption processes of a standard metropolitan human, and add the across the planet shipping distances, the increased and increasing “morale support,” and the special equipment and amraments, as well as the relatively good and very secure consumer paychecks when they’re home, and the entropic totals would surely be staggering.
21 January 2010, 12:53 pmDeAnander:
I remember some good historical footage of Der Fuehrer being presented with a cake in the shape of the Caucasus, with chocolate syrup dribbled over it to represent the rich cache of oil that would reward its conquest. I think it appears in either CBC’s End of Suburbia or Matt Savinar’s (somewhat self-serving but still pretty good) doco A Crude Awakening.
Youtube to the rescue: there it is, weird but afaik authentic. It sheds some historical light on shenanigans like Bush clowning around looking for “terrorists under the table” at a press conference; the ultra-powerful seem to resort in the end to childish foolery, almost flaunting their unaccountability and impunity. Or maybe power really is infantilising, who knows.
21 January 2010, 1:44 pmrootlesscosmo:
That this scientific consensus is being used by capitalist apologists to sell cap and trade schemes, et al, to the public does not mean the science is wrong.
I agree completely. But isn’t this fairly close to what I was trying to say about Derrick Jensen’s wholesale rejection of the benefits of science, or the necessity imposed by reality? Our choices about climate change right now are constrained by the best evidence we’ve got, analyzed by the most reliable methods we can use; it’s childish and mechanistic to describe this (in Richard Dawkins’ phrase) as Nature “holding a gun to our heads,” but it’s willfully ignorant (or dishonest) to pretend, as Jensen seems to, that matters aren’t what they are.
22 January 2010, 4:29 pmm.c.:
As a follow-up to Coakley, I know Scott Brown had lots of money, but someone for MSNBC said reporting from Boston that Brown made 60 event appearances, to Coakley’s 19. Average talent & hard work will beat brains and laziness 90%. of the time.
23 January 2010, 1:22 pmJohn:
Glacier Meltdown: Another Scientific Scandal Involving the IPCC Climate Research Group
By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, January 23, 2010
Only days after the failed Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, yet a new scandal over the scientific accuracy of the UN IPCC 2007 climate report has emerged. Following the major data-manipulation scandals from the UN-tied research center at Britain’s East Anglia University late 2009, the picture emerges of one of the most massive scientific frauds of recent history.
Senior members of the UN climate project, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been forced to admit a major error in the 2007 IPCC UN report that triggered the recent global campaign for urgent measures to reduce “manmade emissions” of CO2. The IPCC’s 2007 report stated, “glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world.” Given that this is the world’s highest mountain range and meltdown implies a massive flooding of India, China and the entire Asian region, it was a major scare “selling point” for the IPCC agenda. As well, the statement on the glacier melt in the 2007 IPCC report contains other serious errors such as the statement that “Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035.” There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas. And a table in the report says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840 meters. Then comes a math mistake: It says that’s a rate of 135.2 meters a year, when it really is only 23.5 meters a year. Now scientists around the world are scouring the entire IPCC report for indications of similar lack of scientific rigor.
It emerges that the basis of the stark IPCC glacier meltdown statement of 2007 was not even a scientific study of melting data. Rather it was a reference to a newspaper article cited by a pro-global warming ecological advocacy group, WWF.
The original source of the IPCC statement, it turns out, appeared in a 1999 report in the British magazine, New Scientist that was cited in passing by WWF. The New Scientist author, Fred Pierce, wrote then, “The inclusion of this statement has angered many glaciologists, who regard it as unjustified. Vijay Raina, a leading Indian glaciologist, wrote in a paper published by the Indian Government in November that there is no sign of “abnormal” retreat in Himalayan glaciers. India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, accused the IPCC of being “alarmist.” The IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, has hit back, denouncing the Indian government report as “voodoo science” lacking peer review. He adds that “we have a very clear idea of what is happening” in the Himalayas.” [1]
The same Pachauri, co-awardee of the Nobel Prize with Al Gore, has recently been under attack for huge conflicts of interest related to his business interests that profit from the CO2 global warming agenda he promotes.[2]
Pearce notes that the original claim made by Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, in a 1999 email interview with Pearce, namely that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035, never was repeated by Hasnain in any peer-reviewed scientific journal, and that Hasnain now says the remark was “speculative”.
Despite the lack of scientific validation, the 10-year-old claim ended up in the IPCC fourth assessment report published in 2007. Moreover the claim was extrapolated to include all glaciers in the Himalayas.
Since publication of the latest New Scientist article, the IPCC officially has been forced to issue the following statement: “the IPCC said the paragraph “refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers. In drafting the paragraph in question, the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly.”
The IPCC adds, “The IPCC regrets the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance.” But the statement calls for no action beyond stating a need for absolute adherence to IPCC quality control processes. “We reaffirm our strong commitment to ensuring this level of performance,” the statement said.” [3]
In an indication of the defensiveness prevailing within the UN’s IPCC, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chair of the IPCC, insists that the mistake did nothing to undermine the large body of evidence that showed the climate was warming and that human activity was largely to blame. He told BBC News: “I don’t see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report.”
Some serious scientists disagree. Georg Kaser, an expert in glaciology with University of Innsbruck in Austria and a lead author for the IPCC, gave a damning different assessment of the implications of the latest scandal affecting the credibility of the IPCC. Kaser says he had warned that the 2035 prediction was clearly wrong in 2006, months before the IPCC report was published. “This [date] is not just a little bit wrong, but far out of any order of magnitude. All the responsible people are aware of this weakness in the fourth assessment. All are aware of the mistakes made. If it had not been the focus of so much public opinion, we would have said ‘we will do better next time’. It is clear now that working group II has to be restructured.” [4]
The chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, has made no personal comment on the glacier claim. It appears he is as well shaken by the wave of recent scandals. He told a conference in Dubai on energy recently, “They can’t attack the science so they attack the chairman. But they won’t sink me. I am the unsinkable Molly Brown (sic). In fact, I will float much higher,” he told the Guardian. His remarks suggest more the ‘spirit of Woodstock’ in 1969 than of what is supposed to be the world’s leading climate authority.
F. William Engdahl is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order
Notes
[1] Fred Pearce, Debate heats up over IPCC melting glaciers claim, 11 January 2010, accessed in http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18363-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news.
[2] F. William Engdahl, UN IPCC Climate Change chief in Conflict of Interest Scandal, December 27, 2009.
[3] Seth Borenstein, UN climate report riddled with errors on glaciers, AP, January 20, 2010.
[4] Ibid.
23 January 2010, 4:01 pmStan:
John, please abbreviate and link.
This article is about one report, and its primary citation – Fred Pearce – is on record as a science writer, saying:
FULL
Unlike Engdahl, this skeptical scientist questions models against complexity, but does not project these questions into an agenda to deny anthrogenic climate change.
23 January 2010, 4:19 pmld:
AFAICT Engdahl has something of a “brown-red” Russophilia about him. He is not an altogether unreliable source when he reports and analyzes US geo-strategy in Central Asia, US efforts to achieve total nuclear dominance, US attempts to contain and hobble Russia in its near abroad, and so forth. But like most Russophiles (and many, perhaps most, ordinary Russians) he is an AGW skeptic/denialist, and a peak oil skeptic/denialist too, insinuating and sometimes outright arguing that these “junk science” narratives are neo-imperialist fairy tales, aimed at hydrocarbon superpower mother Russia. And although Engdahl has reasonable opinions to offer on some topics, some of the time, let’s not forget the many years he put in as a LaRouchenik.
23 January 2010, 8:44 pmld:
Regarding F William, see also a (hard-hitting) post authored by me on a comment string at this very website, less than a year ago. It’s the final entry:
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:okcTDw61C2YJ:www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2007/08/14/buy-corn/+%22Feral+Scholar%22+LaRouche&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
23 January 2010, 9:08 pmStan:
The link doesn’t seem to work, ld.
23 January 2010, 9:51 pmld:
Sorry and thanks for following up. Here’s the link:
23 January 2010, 10:07 pmhttp://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2007/08/14/buy-corn/
DeAnander:
Thanks ld. The Russian nationalist connection would account for the denialism being promoted by Strategic Cultural Foundation (primary affliation of e.g. Olga Chetverikova cited above). There’s also a massive denialist presence around the Alberta Tar Sands, of course — millions of bucks invested, the promise of “set your own price” for the resulting oil, and the good ol’ carrot of “jobs created” to buy the locals’ loyalty and devotion to the insane porkbarrel project (and their silence and/or complacency about Canada’s very own environmental disaster area).
So there is a nationalist as well as a corporate aspect to the fossil fuel noise machine; and nationalism is a powerful emotional tool. Both Canada and Russia have their pet nationalist “climate optimists” who promise that their countries will become warmer, greener, more agriculturally productive with a warming climate (apparently, the prospect of sacrificing the entire Equatorial region with its billions of people doesn’t tarnish this bright prospect much, for those who believe in it).
24 January 2010, 2:54 pmm.c.:
After this I’ll be quiet on this topic. Right after the Dec. 8 Primary, Martha Coakley was up in the polling 31 points. ~65-35%. She then went on vacation. A 6 week window timeframe until the General Election.
In 2006, Ned Lamont went on a month long vacation in Maine after winning the Primary against the well-known incumbent when he should have been campaigning in working-class neigborhoods raising his profile.
24 January 2010, 4:10 pmStan:
FULL
27 January 2010, 8:30 pmStan:
This from Kathy Kelly, though I haven’t found her source:
There should be around 98,000 troops (not counting ‘contractors’) in Afghanistan by mid-year (my son included). iirc, around 110,000 in Iraq… thats over 200K so far, again not counting contractors. Is my math wrong when that adds up to 4,400,000 gallons a day? I’m not good at math. That’s $1.76 billion a day in petroleum costs at the $400/gallon figure. Unless the oil is cheaper to get to Iraq-based US troops, which it may well be. No local production, and very poor infrastructure. Still – and I’d like to see Kathy’s source – the sheer quantity of oil claimed here is staggering.
28 January 2010, 1:32 pmDeAnander:
Mike Davis — gee — is the writer I like to be if I were more broadly educated and smarter. He’s good, really good. I love the concluding line to that 2nd graf; it echoes the trend of my own thoughts in recent years. More perhaps on this later — on resistance to Enclosure, on human ingenuity and repurposing/scrounging.
28 January 2010, 2:55 pmStan:
FULL
Like De, I just like to read what this guy writes (Bro Orlov). No one casn say such grim things and make me laugh.
28 January 2010, 4:32 pmDeAnander:
I like Dmitry’s latest meditation on “community building”…
This I think is a subtext of the US “aid” effort in Haiti (and earlier in NOLA). One of the purposes of the intervention is to *prevent* — with truncheons, choppers, fences and authority figures wielding bullhorns — people from realising that they can self-organise. Solnit apparently covers this elite panic reaction in her latest book, which I really have to get around to… It’s as if the emergency situation opens a rift in received reality, in which people might actually realise that they can form community and that they don’t *need* the authorities…
29 January 2010, 1:32 amStan:
He also takes a swipe at NGO/non-profit “community-building” (and I’ll add “movement-building”). As Illich did in his scathing criticisms of the Alliance for Democracy, Peace Corps, et al.
29 January 2010, 7:26 amxenia:
ngos provide some jobs (including translation on the higher and cleaning on the lower) in places like bosnia, which is why people don’t complain about them publicly, but you’ll hear a lot of mockery behind closed doors.
some of the most shocking assertions i have ever seen about the country come from clearly friendly and well-intended americans, canadians and brits working in ngos in sarajevo (ie that bosnians belong to different races, that people are learning english only now, after “democracy” arrived etc. i suppressed the more offensive ones from my mind). extremely rare is the person who learns the language even after a few years in the country. certainly i take anything they say with half a ton of salt.
my cynical take on it is that the only truly good innovation those folks brought with them are chinese and indian restaurants, which are however too expensive for regular population to eat in (at least natives are not banned from such facilities, as seems to be the case with similar establishments in afghanistan…an old tradition, leading us back to the us presence in the caribbean).
29 January 2010, 1:30 pm(Boer) Tom:
A standard joke about NGOs – “What do you call it when a politician skims 15% of foreign aid? Corruption. What do you call it when an NGO skims 50% of foreign aid? Overhead.” Of course, foreign aid tends to do plenty of other harms, and seems to be designed to create food dependence.
@Xenia – I have a friend who’s heading to Bosnia to work for such an NGO for a few months (he’s got bills to pay), and indicated that he’d like to learn the language before he goes – would you judge Croatian to be too far from Bosnian for learning the basics? I’ve got a decent Croatian workbook on order, and I have a bit of a Ukrainian language background (vocab about 1k words, plus complete grammar) – would that generally be sufficient in your mind to get the language skills up to scratch?
30 January 2010, 3:14 amxenia:
@boer tom, croatian, bosnian and serbian are one language (i’m a native speaker who lived in several parts of the country, plus i minored in linguistics). their separation was based on purely political grounds, since in the balkans they adhere to the 19th century understanding that each nation must have its own language (it’s the good old thinking about blood, race, etc).
so, serbian and croatian are certainly closer to each other than british and american english, and bosnian has elements of both (of course, bosnian croats and serbs speak it the same way as bosnian muslims). the problem is not at all the standard language, but the shock of learning standard middle class zagrebian or belgradian style from books and then being faced with a slightly different musicality and a lot of colloquial speech. i suggest that your friend work through the croatian book and listen to a lot of bosnian pop-music, that will help with the difference in pronunciation.
the joke sounds very true…
30 January 2010, 3:53 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Xenia
31 January 2010, 12:17 amThanks! Just one more question. I’ve heard that the Bosnian ‘h’ is pronounced in a (Slavically) non-standard way (or is that Serbian?) – could you supply the phone/phoneme? I would expect [x], but wikipedia is a bit confusing on this matter.
xenia:
sorry for the length, but i prefer the forum to email…
not sure whether the rest of the readers will appreciate this discussion, but there it is. first of all, i’m not a slavicist, because i find the study of eastern europe boring and upsetting (yes, it’s sheer subjectivity) and i resisted the numerous attempts by american colleagues and advisers to push me toward what seemed to them an easy way to academic glory. i’m interested primarily in latin american studies and by extension in african and asian languages and cultures. however, i do have enough linguistic competency to answer this one.
—–
[x] certainly could be taken as a base from which the other variations of the phoneme develop. generally, it not pronounced as strongly as in russian or german, but actually there is nothing exotic phonetically happening here. the main issues belong to sociolinguistics, as you can see below (this is mostly for boer tom, others can read the last paragraph which is less specific).
in peasant and colloquial speech, the initial h will often drop out, but not so in careful and urban speech. the tendency for the h to disappear initially may be slightly stronger in serbian and bosnian varieties. i tend to think it is connected with turkish influence, since in turkish the h is also “softer” than in slavic or german (although it does not disappear initially in those same words as it does in serbian and bosnian). so, generally in serbia and bosnia it’s a class distinction which was established some 150 years ago: peasants often drop it, educated people include it (simple example: hocu (i want) in peasant and quick speech becomes “‘ocu”). at its base, it is no more than that. it’s a social phenomenon, dependent upon specific vocabulary items and usage, rather than a strictly observable and consistent phonetic change.
concerning that phoneme and others, some information can be gleaned from the charts given on the wikipedia page below, which is however not completely reliable. eg the chart states that the difference between the varieties is unambiguous. let’s take their supposed example of duhan (purportedly cr/bos) versus duvan (srb). in reality, while croatian speakers (from croatia) will say duhan for tobacco, in bosnia it can be duvan or duhan (mostly this happens unconsciously, including bosnian croat speakers), and in serbia it is duvan. in that respect, as in most others, you’ll see confirmed my assertion above: bosnian is a transitional form between standard serbian and croatian, with elements of both.
so, the following statement is actually a wish rather than a description of reality: “The Bosnian official language allows both variants, and ambiguities are resolved with preference to the Croatian variant; this is a general practice for Serbian-Croatian ambiguities.” in an attempt to explicitly dissociate from serbian forms, many bosniak and some bosnian croatian intellectuals have imported forms from written croatian in the last 10 years, seeing them as more bourgeois, anti-communist and western european. however, that’s quite artificial and in spontaneous speech they will still use both, almost at random.
the other fashionable shibboleth of the official bosniak speech concerning the h in the medium position is this: it is inserted into some common words, such as “meko” (soft), “lako” (light, easy), to produce “mehko”, “lahko”. this is taken as one of the chief evidences that bosnian is indeed a separate language. however, this occurs in some 10 words, and in reality only old people from muslim families or bosniak nationalists will speak in this manner. the practice seems to be rooted in a tendency toward overcorrection (the turkish word mahrama for “covering, headscarf” became pronounced marama in the course of time, leading elite muslim speakers who were careful to reinsert the h to believe that the h had to be reinserted in other (slavic!) words as well).
in many ways, it is best to consult non-sophisticated native speakers, because many of them will not be up to date with the latest linguistic ideology. so, to take one of the examples, you might ask them: do you say suvo or suho for “dry”? most people in bosnia use those interchangeably, so you will get laughter and “who cares? it’s the same” out of them rather than a confirmation of the below.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differences_between_standard_Bosnian,_Croatian_and_Serbian
anyway, to wrap this up, i’d pay attention to this:
1. the one real difference between croatian and serbian speech is ijekavian vs. ekavian pronunciation of one old sound. so, here is te word for “child”:
cr dijete (however, at the coast, “dite” is said, that’s ikavian)
sr dete
bosnian: written dijete, spoken always d’jete (all three confessions).
using ekavian in bosnia is highly uncommon even among nationalists among serbian bosnians. so when in bosnia, absolutely stick to the ijekavian forms, but be prepared for parts of syllables to be dropped in regular bosnian speech.
2. bosnian (and serbian!!!) have a higher proportion of turkish, arabic and persian words. those are often considered colloquialisms or provincialisms, so they are not always included in croatian dictionaries. in addition, bosniak intelligentsia has tried to reintroduce more of those words into common speech. however, they had a problem: many of them are considered obsolete, or incompatible with their desire to use standard croatian (purportedly european) words. this is an important matter in terms of usage, as many obscure “oriental” words will make you sound like an old muslim man, but the right amount will be perceived as pleasant, friendly and intimate — and this is something valid for muslims, serbs and croats in bosnia alike. again, usage is guidance, and most foreign language study materials cannot help you with this.
—
this discussion, as confusing as it may sound in details, attempts to show that when political imperatives arise for the creation of new states, very minute differences will be emphasized ad absurdum, and subsequently reified. something similar happened when macedonian was created as a language in the 1940s to assert that macedonians in yugoslav territory had absolutely nothing to do with bulgarians and that bulgarians could not make any claims on the territory: relatively small differences in actual speech were codified and elevated to beome the standard form. the process is currently being repeated after montenegro declared independence, and promptly montenegrin was declared a separate language. of course, this is a european dynamic, incidentally very strange from the latin american or african point of view, where language in and of itself usually does not constitute an ethnicity.
31 January 2010, 6:44 pm(Boer) Tom:
@Xenia
Sorry for the uncomfortable reminders. I was just confused, as in the east and west slavic speech I’ve heard (and Ukrainian in particular) [x] is always pronounced clearly, and does not disappear or get shifted to [v] (Russian does shift g->v in one suffix). A similar (and similarly corny) ‘Europeanist’ mentality exists among certain western Ukrainians (coupled with a sense of lack of direction with the minimal standardization of Ukrainian vis-a-vis Russian and Polish).
To me that unpleasantness of history at home also exists (Apartheid, colonial mentalities, etc) – my escape was the Slavic languages – but at the end of the day, I have a far more intimate relationship with the problems back home than in eastern Europe, and as such, I’d more likely be able to do something helpful about the former. The challenge was to get over the more intense emotional matters – I used Shalif’s method in dealing with the emotional reactions of that subjectivity… It tends to reshape it, so that it no longer is emotionally oppressive. I still get angry, sad etc, but am not straining for air/breathing, and I pay finer attention to the structure of such peoples’ mentality and develop accessible counter-stories to undermine those kinds of thinking – sometimes something needs to be said forcefully.
1 February 2010, 12:06 amm.c.:
I lost track of my John Edwards thread, but had I known how he self-destructed(including the sex video tape) I might have voted and encouraged other to vote for Bill Richardson in the ’08 primaries….
1 February 2010, 4:56 pmxenia:
@boertom, don’t worry about it, i’m glad to help. it may not always be easy, but that it life itself, as opposed to a tv commercial…
1 February 2010, 9:15 pmm.c.:
One Backstory:
Today a blip on CNN. This year so far, 16 banks in the U.S. have failed. Big Fish chewing up the Little Fish?
7 February 2010, 4:03 pmStan:
FULL
8 February 2010, 9:32 pmm.c.:
My early guess is that Rick Perry will win the ’12 GOP presidential primary, win or lose his governor’s seat this year. He’s a former captain in the USAF btw. Has anyone noticed ever GOP pres. nominee since Eisenhower in 1952 has worn the uniform? Mitt Romney might get the VP slot…. Being from Texas has political advantages. Southerners think your’e one of them, so do midwesterners & mountain west people.
18 February 2010, 1:43 pmm.c.:
Last night on the PBS newshour, a banking expert & former regulator said that the top 10 banks in the U.S. control about 75% of the money. I presume this does not include unregulated hedge fund money (who knows how much of it out there is)???
19 February 2010, 12:34 pmm.c.:
Some of the NeoCons are big on Mitch Daniels (Indiana & its neighbor, Ohio being critical in electoral math), and of course the sleeper, Jeb Bush.
20 February 2010, 1:04 pmm.c.:
A good short piece about Worker’s Rights in the March 2010 Harpers by a Chicago lawyer, Thomas Geoghegan titled “Consider the Germans” pp.7-9 in print(its out in the booksellers now). Or Google ‘harpers magazine’; Click on Current Issue and scroll down to Notebook. Sadly you need to subscribe to get the whole thing.
21 February 2010, 4:08 pmCurt:
I just found out that the expected average life span of a wind powered electrical turbine is only 25 years. That sounds dismal. Is that the whole thing or only the components at the top of the structure? If the whole thing needs to be torn down and rebuilt after 25 years on the average that seems very discouraging. What I read said that it costs 2 million dollars to make 1 megawatt of wind turbines. But how many megawatts of energy does it take to make one megawatt of wind turbines? To me that looks like a hell of a lot of energy that it took to smelt all of the metal into a tower and blades and the electrogizmo on top.
24 September 2010, 4:38 amCurt:
@ Charles,
I think that we have a lot in common. Would you agree with the following decleration?:
I have some level of symphathy for local street gangs. Their members come from the poor miseducated lower economic classes of society. They engage in unjustifiable violence and in promoting harmful activities such as hard drug use and prostitution.
9 January 2011, 3:25 pmIn essence they behave much like the militaries of the US and the UK although they do not employ any spokespeople to make the farsical claim that what they do is for the benifit of society like the PR spokesman of our siegreich glorious militaries do.
However when it comes to the Hells Angles and Banditoes motorcycle gangs I have no symphathy what so ever.
In fact if I were the leader of the US or any European country I would conspire with the national police to exterminate every member of these motorcycle gangs. No trials no torture just a head full of lead to every member in a very short period of time.
The members of these gangs declare war on civilization itself from the very moment that they put on the gang jacket.* (Do I need to provide a footnote for that?)A member of these gangs is 100 times more deserving of death than a member of the Taliban.(Do I need to provide a footnote or documntation for that?) Usually it is better to reform someone than to kill them. These gang members are an exception.
I do not think that it would be technically very difficult to round them all up in one night and execute them. The Chilean police and military rounded up all my brethern and executed them in a very short period of time. The police could track them quite easily if they wanted to. They wear uniforms for christs sake. If it is really neccessary our police could get technical assistance from retired Latin Police Officers who served in regimes with expirience in this type of thing.
Of course civilized societies have laws to deal with criminals. I say that these gang members do not deserve the benifit of laws. Laws are for those who make some mistakes not for those who engage in a wholesale rebellion against humanity.
It is not worth the taxpayers money to bring such scum to trial and then to pay to guard and feed them while they rot in jail. They would probably even prefer a quick death to a trial and jail time anyways. Sure when speaking before news cameras the leaders of these gangs may appear reasonable, even charming. The same shit can be said of Generals.
An example needs to be set. We are the new state.
(Or at least would be if I were in charge.)
We are benevolent to those trying to live in peace with in a society. Do not think for a second that you can form a gang that engages in sexual slavery, murder, extortion, and hard drug trafficing and be able to live to tell about it let alone enjoy profits from it.
Now of course if I were the leader of the US or some European country and I gave orders which were followed that resulted in the deaths of hundreds maybe even thousands of people with out a trial I would expect that some people would call for my own imprisonment or death. If there was a change in government at some future point and I did go to prison or was executed for my role in such an event I would not have the slightest regret for doing what I did. In fact I would repeat it again if given a chance.
Of course I would not expect vegans or even vegitarians to agree with my proposal. But maybe someone will read this that will someday become the US Attorney General or the head of a European country. Who could have guessed that the Seahawks would have beaten the Saints? (Do I need permission from the NFL to say that? After all they say that any accounts of the game is forbidden and I just gave an account of the game.)
Curt
Curt:
Curt just think about this:
9 January 2011, 3:40 pmFirst they came for the Hells Angles.
Then they came for the active and even the retired generals.
Then they came for the active and even the retired congressmen and some of their staffs.
Then they came for the active and retired district attorneys.
Then they came for the big polluters of our streams, rivers, and air.
Finally they came for me and there was no one léft to defend me.
Curt
Curt:
Curt are you ever stupid.
9 January 2011, 3:42 pmIf you were able to round up and shoot all of the criminals in America who would be left to come for you?
Curt
Curt:
Curt are you ever stupid.
9 January 2011, 3:44 pmIf I rounded up and shot all the criminals in America the Vegans the Vegitarians and the Buddhists might come for me.
Curt
Curt:
I think that the idea of burial at sea is quite useful as a cover story. Then people buried could be transfered to work the rest of thier lives in the bottom of a Chinese Coal mine, or perhaps an abandon Dutch or nearby German Coal mine and nobody will be looking for them. After all if Deutsche Bank is left to take the rap alone as the sacrificial lamb for US Banking Industry the result might be that German Coal Mines could awaken from the dead with the help of Russian money.
4 May 2011, 8:59 amWhat is still an open question in my book is how many people should suffer this fate of burial at sea without a trial, 3000, 30,000, 300,000 or even 3,000,000. Makin a list chechen it twice gonna find out who is naughty and nice Santa Ansger is comming to town.
Who is Stallin the outcome?
Is it time to contact my attorney?