Evidence accumulates that policies aimed at increasing bio-fuels and energy self-sufficiency may cause more problems than they solve including destruction of habitats (decreasing biodiversity), the seizing of land form small land holders in developing countries (to grow palm trees in monoculture plantations for example), decreasing availability of food (increasing the cost of food commodities). Palm oils are forecast to account for 45% of Europe’s biodiesel by 2020. Solutions that transfer problems rather than resolve them are destructive in a global economy. Energy self-sufficiency is such a problem. The only solution is to be less energy reliant – but that contradicts the premise of a technological based civilization.
We are accustomed to trust maps, to invest confidence in the data with which they present us. But in the pre-modern expressions, mapmaking was a pursuit that mingled knowledge and supposition, that told stories about places, that admitted fear, love, memory and amazement into its projections – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 2009 p141
Quantity quantification is destruction
Destroyer of worlds becoming
Count the bodybags – add up the cost
Quality, qualification is creation
Breathing life into clay – changing
Ribs into beings – make love not war
Like beauty is becoming as is the future
The white house is silent. / My friends can’t hear me yet. / The flicker who lives in the bare trees at the field’s edge / Pecks once and is still for a long time – James Wright – Collected Poems, 1972 p130
If you are paid (a salary, a rate or even a fee) then you are working class even if you are the President
Gossip functions as a kind of community policing… If you deviated from social norms you would be noticed and gossiped about – Ned Niedziecki – The Peep Diaries, 2009 p143
Education is a ‘rite-of-passage’ and without any production function
The world that economic theory normally pictures is one in which individuals all seek their own good and are indifferent to the success or failure of other individuals engaged in the same activity – Herman E Daly – For the Common Good., 1989 p159
Being working class means being greater than “who you are” or at least who you are allowed to be
Like the terrorist, the sex offender is a new category of human being – JoAnn Wypijewski – The Nation (Feb 8, 2010) p7 – but one which is not a being totally unlike the heretic and the witch – someone for whom torture is not unjustified
Like the woman who gave
You an evil eye
Like the parrot that shits
On your head
Like that hunger for revenge
That gnaws at your soul
Like this desire for respect
The keeps you in debt
Like the President with his finger
Up your ass
Like the Man on the Moon
Taking his snail pace
Thousands of years of human living and dying have destroyed the possibility of the pristine wild… The human and the wild cannot be partitioned – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 2009 p127
Factoid: Time spent actually sleeping (as opposed to lying in bed) decreases with age for healthy adults – about 10 minuets a decade, however as we get older that sleep becomes less continuous
Mephistophelas: There is a natural way to make you young… / Go out in a field / And start right to work; dig, hoe, / keep your thought and yourself in that field, / Eat the food you raise… / Be willing to manure the field you harvest. / And that’s the best way – take it from me!
Faust: So narrow a life would not suit me
Mephistophelas: Well then, we must have the witch – Goethe
Inadequacy serves self-discipline rather than revolt
Next up more fame, more acclaim, more opportunities to really show what you can do – Ned Niedziecki – The Peep Diaries, 2009 p101
Factoid: Unionization results in a 15% increase in hourly wages, a 19% increase in the likehood of having employer provided health insurance and a 24% increase in the likelihood of having empoyer sponsored retirement plans.
Generally reality TV stops just short of snuff – Ned Niedziecki – The Peep Diaries, 2009 p105
Moths can fly at 100 kilometers an hour with a tail wind but what is interesting is that they are able to detect when the best time to fly and which winds will best assist them in both the northward and southward migrations. And the moths are able to adjust for up to 20 degrees of drift. Pretty smart for a moth.
We want them to spill their guts and presumably they want to spill their guts. That’s no voyeurism. That’s Peep culture, a culture in which a desire to be watched and to watch others being watched pervades almost everything we do – Ned Niedziecki – The Peep Diaries, 2009 p111
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