Posts Tagged ‘oil’
Weekend!
* “This used to be a forest?” The age of extreme oil.
* This is such a simple point, but it sort of needs to be shouted from the rooftops: to change the basic and fundamental framework of the law in response to the crisis of the moment – or what is deemed to be a crisis – is to clarify that the law is a dead letter, like a fire insurance policy that is not valid in cases of fire. Aaron’s talking specifically about the current crisis in Quebec, but the point is widely applicable to the last forty years of public life in the U.S., accelerating since 2000.
* “The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac,” Hanif Kureishi has a character say in The Buddha of Suburbia, “is reread him at thirty-eight.” If that was true, I wondered as I opened the first two volumes of the Library of America’s ongoing series of the complete novels, then what of Vonnegut at a decade older still?
* From the Dan Harmon files: Community and Dan Harmon’s Imploding Author Function. The Darkest Timeline. Daniel Fienberg. Josef Adalian. Maureen Ryan.
* Bumper sticker of the month: MY OTHER CAR IS A STUDENT LOAN.
* Because it’s there: Oldest Woman to Climb Mount Everest Breaks Her Own Record.
* NAACP Endorses Marriage Equality.
* Science proves my script for Sherlock Holmes and Hamlet Meet Dracula is a guaranteed blockbuster.
* And once again mightygodking solves Hollywood’s problems, free of charge.
Saturday Night!
* Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford.
* Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.
* “Budget Cuts Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough.”
* Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
* A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. Those Humanities Ph.D.’s! Colleges as Merchants of Debt. Could Your Student Loans Make You Unemployable?
* Profiles in courage: Mitt Romney’s Support Of Same-Sex Adoption Lasts One Day.
* And then Canada destroyed the climate. Enjoy your weekend!
Saturday!
* Today, Trina is one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. I was pretty cranky about this the other day on Twitter with respect to the Mitt Romney bullying story (on which subject fellow UNCG MFA alum Steve Almond gets biblical here).
* Brazilian politicians and journalists were not placated. “We’re going to show this gang that they can’t come down here and create whatever environmental mess they want,” Carlos Minc, a co-founder of Brazil’s Green Party and environmental secretary of Rio state, told the newspaper O Globo. “I want to see the CEO of Chevron swim in that oil.” Great!
* The free market as more efficient than central planning, case 751.
* All of the current administrative solutions are perverse and/or unsustainable. Public universities cannot solve their financial problems by raising tuition even more quickly in the face of the tuition bubble, the student debt bubble, public anger after decades of similar annual increases at 3-4 times inflation, a pro-education president who is campaigning to punish tuition increases with further funding cuts, and mounting damage to an entire academic generation symbolized by the recent tripling of the number of PhDs on food stamps.
* Funny how this works: Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.
Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.
* A quick note from Jameson about base and superstructure.
* The Lego Lord of the Rings Videogame Is Really Happening. I’ll take one of each applicable video game system, please.
* Wes Anderson Tumblr blogs. It’s early going, but “Directed by Wes Anderson” may eventually be your winner here.
* And I’d have paid good money to see a Maurice Sendak Avengers.
Some More Wednesday Links
* Science proves men are stupid around women.
* 10 “Occupy” Candidates Running for Congress. Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin is singled out for praise as the likely new senator from our upcoming new home.
* Personally, of course, I belong to the Optimism! party.
* Salon on “the new oil reality.”
* Apple Is Now Larger Than The Entire American Retail Sector.
* One in Seven Americans Thinks the Affordable Care Act Has Already Been Overturned. I mean really.
* “This desperation starts once you realize how much you’ve lost, and then you feel like you can’t stop because you’ve got to win it back,” she told me. “Sometimes I’d start feeling jumpy, like I couldn’t think straight, and I’d know that if I pretended I might take another trip soon, it would calm me down. Then they would call and I’d say yes because it was so easy to give in. I really believed I might win it back. I’d won before. If you couldn’t win, then gambling wouldn’t be legal, right?”
* Barack Obama is currently leading Mitt Romney in the polls by anything between 12 and -2. Can’t argue with facts.
* And from New York Magazine, dateline 1970: “Mugging as a Way of Life.”
‘Science Fiction without the Future’
I was recently asked to write a review of Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America for a special “Petrofictions” issue of American Book Review. Imre has put the full text up on Facebook; hopefully you can read it there. Here’s a bit from the end:
…Here then is what science fiction looks like without (or after) the future: the twentieth century is envisioned not as the launching pad for a glorious technofuture but as an anomalous moment of prosperity and historical possibility which quickly burns itself out, leaving in its place the worst combination of Manifest-Destiny America, feudal Europe, and decadent Rome. The novel’s odd, melancholy temporality—a retrospectively narrative bildungsroman set in a future that is simultaneously a parody of the past—completely upends our sense that the last hundred years represent the apex of progress, and indeed the idea that history can be thought of as any story of progress at all. By its end Julian Comstockhas taken its reader well beyond the postmodern mood Fredric Jameson famously called “nostalgia for the present,” and comes to feel something like officiating at our own collective funeral.
But for all its anticipatory retrospection of the coming post-oil disaster, the novel is not hopeless. In the epilogue we are told that Adam has in essence gone on to reinvent the lost art of science fiction itself; in 2192 his most recent novel is American Boys on the Moon, a Jules-Verne-style adventure yarn about a group of youngsters who discover an old NASA rocket buried in Florida and use it to reach the moon. (In a footnote, Adam concedes the story is completely implausible, but admits he likes it anyway.) There are similar hints throughout the novel that a second age of enlightenment and invention could be in the offing, and indeed that the reign of the despotic and theocratic Dominion may soon be at its end. The theocrats are themselves huge believers in progress, insisting “the history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom”—but Julian’s revolutionary retort, seemingly borne out, is that history is actually chaos, written in sand and shaped by the wind (674). For Wilson, it seems, there’s an exciting, even necessary freedom in this permanent historical flux, which when juxtaposed against the violent schemes of the rich and powerful becomes in its own unstable and impermanent way a kind of unexpected utopia. The cyclicality of history turns out to be as cruel to kings and tyrants as it is to everything else; in time all their dreams of power and control turn to ash as well. Even in a history that can’t stop repeating itself, we find, the bad times eventually end, and good days someday come again.
They’re Paving Paradise
Quick Hits
* “Proposed new calendar would make time rational.”
According to Richard Conn Henry’s calendar, eight months would each have 30 days. Every third month would have 31 days. Every so often, to account for the leftover time, a whole extra week would be added.
The upshot: Years would proceed with clockwork regularity, with no annual re-jiggering of schedules required. Each day would occupy the same position as it had the previous year and would in the next. Were this 364-day calendar, known officially as the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, adopted on the first day of 2012, both Christmas and New Year’s Day would forever fall on Sunday.
If the bonus week can be a work-free jubilee, I’m in.
* And then climate change ate all our peanuts.
* And then Rick Perry annexed Canada.
* The SSA said 50 percent of workers made less than $26,364 last year — and most Americans have fewer job opportunities available to them. But the wealthiest Americans are relatively unscathed, with those earning $1 million or more jumping 18 percent from 2009. More here.
* Charles Taylor asks, “Is there any other living novelist who calls for a perpetual re-evaluation as much as Stephen King?” I’m not exactly a fan (though there’s quite a bit I like), but he’s definitely someone I’d like to teach a class on at some point.
* Death of cinema watch: Bridesmaids is the only top fifteen film this year that is neither a sequel, a reboot, or an adaptation.
* Bad news everyone: Clean paper towels are filthy. Your only hope now is to finally build that cleanroom.
* Why you’re fat and will always be fat. Via MeFi.
* Robert Reich predicts Obama-Clinton 2012. The Clinton-Biden switch has seemed like the only possible option for ’12 since at least 2008; it’s a huge unforced error if they don’t.
* And TEDxBrussels predicts 2061. No word on if there will still be peanuts.
Saturday Night Links
* SOPA update from Cory Doctorow: The Judiciary Committee will have another chance to pass the bill out of committee at a special session on December 21.
* The headline reads, Australia’s most cherished marsupial, the koala, is in danger of becoming extinct in the wild within 30 years after an outbreak of chlamydia.
* The headline reads, Two deaths from brain-eating amoeba linked to sinus remedy for colds. Does the world seem a little strange today to anyone else?
* Only the super-rich can save us now! An anonymous cabal of millionaires and billionaires is looking to do something in the 2012 election by running an independent candidate in all 50 states. Just what is that something? I guess we’ll find out.
* Obama vs. the pipeline? As @thinkprogress notes, that’s the whole point of this payroll tax blackmail in the first place.
* Media Matters celebrates Fox & Friends, 2011.
* I’m with Ta-Nehisi: Occupy Wall Street shouldn’t turn into Occupy Trinity Church. If that puts me at odds with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, well, so be it…
* Today in the permafrost apocalypse: A recent estimate suggests that the perennially frozen ground known as permafrost, which underlies nearly a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, contains twice as much carbon as the entire atmosphere.
* Glenn Greenwald: To allow significant political figures to be heralded with purely one-sided requiems — enforced by misguided (even if well-intentioned) notions of private etiquette that bar discussions of their bad acts — is not a matter of politeness; it’s deceitful and propagandistic. More, specifically on Hitchens, from Lenin’s Tomb.
* And your game of the night: Greens Survive Only When Reds Die. Like Lemmings for sociopaths. Enjoy!
All the Oil’s Gone, Nowhere to Go
As ExxonMobil details in its report, more than 95 percent of today’s oil comes from fields discovered before 2000. About 75 percent comes from pre-1980 discoveries. While many massive, older fields can keep gushing for decades — Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, first tapped in 1951, still hums along at 5 million barrels per day — they seem to be dwindling overall. As Exxon’s chart shows, reserves discovered in the 1960s and before maxed out around 1980 (even as oil companies are trying to recover additional oil from older wells with better technology). What’s more, it seems to be getting tougher to squeeze oil out of newer finds.
Sunday Links
* Why they occupy: University of California edition.
* The recession comes home to Morris County.
Morris County has experienced a sharp increase in motor vehicle burglaries throughout 2011, according to Morris County Prosecutor Robert Bianchi, who said the increase can be attributed to independent trends that have emerged in small geographic areas in the county at different times and committed by different individuals.
* MetaFilter has your Neil deGrasse Tyson Overdrive.
* Get me Val Kilmer: Christian Bale says he’s done playing Batman.
“I suppose when I was writing V for Vendetta I would in my secret heart of hearts have thought: wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world… It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped the realm of fiction.”
* Also on the Occupy beat: “Pre-Occupied: The Origins and Future of Occupy Wall Street.” And also at the New Yorker: Was anti-Keystone activism the real political movement of 2011?
* Something Is Happening: Notes on the First Two Months of Occupy.
* Mary Roach: 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Orgasm.
* Aaron Bady: “When everything that can be recorded is recorded, our means of protecting privacy must fundamentally change.”
* Robotic prison wardens to patrol South Korean prison. But the prototype looks so friendly!
Thursday Night
* An asteroid buzzed us yesterday, but the real terror (as Neil de Grasse Tyson reminds us on this week’s Nerdist podcast) remains Apophis in 2036. Get me Bruce Willis!
* Some perspectives on the Keystone XL delay: We’ve been sold out! We’ve won (for now)! We’ve won!
* “We regret that, given the instruction to take down tents and prevent encampment, the police were forced to use their batons to enforce the policy.” Please, stop making us beat you!
* Occupy Oakland’s Big Challenge: The Mayhem Factor.
* Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home will be a musical.
* The next Cold War will be fought with greenhouse gas.
* Naomi Klein: Capitalism vs. the climate.
* And ladies and gentlemen, for the last time anywhere: the Western Black Rhino.
Tomorrow, Tomorrow
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Good People
Tuesday!
* Tomorrow is the big day: Occupy Oakland’s Day of Action. An Interview With a Member of Occupy Oakland About Tomorrow’s General Strike. Businesses brace. The Men’s Wearhouse signs on. OO Declaration of Solidarity with Neighborhood Reclamations. And here’s Rosa Luxemburg.
* In February, Vertigo will reprint Grant Morrison’s Flex Mentallo.
* Will Obama actually do the right thing on the Keystone XL pipeline?
* The not-so-secret subtext of Disney princesses and H.P. Lovecraft’s Peanuts.
