for people right,
for people wrong,
for people all around,
yes,
there will be 2011,
and our theory of it too.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway.

It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.

That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong.

Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

But if you can do that, well, lucky you.

That’s our American Pastoral, as Phillip Roth put it.

…and hundreds of thousands of young counterculturists lived in one commune or another at some point.

It was a period in which huge numbers of young Americans rejected the traditional American way of greed-based and emotionally isolated living and searched for a new life path that embodied sharing, mutual caring, and openness.

Although not all communes achieved their idealistic goals, their very existence represented a yearning of the human spirit for something better than the status quo and a courageousness to act upon these convictions with direct action and sustained efforts.

Global warming…recession…peak oil…data smog…by necessity and by choice, thousands of people are once again being drawn toward collective living, this time empowered by the successes and failures of the past.

Much much more than worn out politics before we work away from harm.

Simon Johnson:

The Age of American Predominance is over.

Our leading bankers looted the state, plunged the world into deep recession, and cost us 8 million jobs.  And now many of them stand by with sharpened knives and enhanced bonuses – also most willing to suggest how the salaries and jobs of others can be further cut.

Think about the morality of that one.

• people are living longer
• not because they are less likely to get sick,
• but because they survive longer with disease…

As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally.

NYTimes,
via Mind Blog

72% of the total annual cost of a Community College education is the cost of textbooks.

Public four-year university students pay between 26-42% of their total annual educational costs on textbooks.

These outlandish costs of textbooks relative to the total cost of education have steadily accelerated at three times the rate of inflation.

Student loans at for-profit colleges have a 46% default rate !

29% of San Francisco’s particulate pollution comes across the Pacific.

China generates about 70% of its electricity with coal-fired power plants, creating large amounts of particulate pollution. Dust storms crossing China pick up these particles and carry them across the Pacific to the U.S.

Gregor Macdonald researches the energy sector.

From the .pdf available here.

When natural gas is trading at $4.00 and oil is trading at $92.00, the price discount offered by natural gas for an equivalent amount of btu is as much as 75%.

Yes, that’s right.

Instead of obtaining oil’s 5.8 million btu for $92, one can obtain 5.8 million btu in natural gas for $23.

The economic opportunity to perform the same amount of useful labor, at 50-75% off the oil price, is not a potentiality that any economist, analyst, or policy maker can afford to ignore.

BitTooth explains how LNG tankers currently supply 23 countries.

via Carbon Tracker

Time history of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 800,000 years to January 2009.

“What power has law where only money rules?” —Petronius, 66 AD

From Economist’s View, to break the lock that big money has on politics:

• “Political corruption in America is staggering.”

• “Powerful forces, many of which operate anonymously under US law, are working relentlessly to defend those at the top of the income distribution.”

• “The Republican Party’s real game is to try to lock that income and wealth advantage into place.”

With help from golfing buddies in elected office, over the last 25 years more than 90 percent of the total growth in income went to the top 10 percent.

Only 9 percent of income growth is divvied up among the lower 90 percent.

About 25 percent of the newly elected Republicans are millionaires. 261 members of Congress are millionaires, and 55 are worth more than $10 million.  Wealth in the Senate grew 16 percent, from $2.27 million to $2.38 million in 2008 alone.

In 1973, the average U.S. CEO was paid $27 for every dollar paid to a typical worker. Three years ago, the ratio had ballooned to $275 to $1.

“The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes.’” —Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter 50 years ago.

Lawrence Lessig:

America’s economic future depends upon restarting an engine of innovation and technological growth.

Corporate America has come to believe that investments in influencing Washington pay more than investments in building a better mousetrap.

That will only change when regulation is crafted as narrowly as possible. Only then can regulators serve the public good, instead of private protection.

We need to kill a philosophy of regulation born with the 20th century, if we’re to make possible a world of innovation in the 21st.

Frank Rich, NY Times:

How many middle-class Americans now believe that the sky is the limit if they work hard enough? How many trust capitalism to give them a fair shake?

Don’t think for one minute this nation is quiet.

As many as 25% of police using steroids?

“Essentially, this has become commonplace.”

Testing in law enforcement — much the way it is in professional sports — is a touchy subject. Like pro ballplayers, officers are usually protected by unions, and drug testing is often used as a bargaining chip. A majority of departments have random testing for street drugs like cocaine and heroin, but few also test regularly for steroids. —A. J. Perez

Simultaneously nuts and serious, don’t you think?

In the Walnut Street Jail, no windows would distract the prisoners with street life; no conversation would disturb their penitence. Alone with God, they would be rehabilitated.

There was a small problem. Many of the prisoners went insane.

Lynn Parramore:

The placement of human beings in solitary confinement is not a measure of their depravity. It is a measure of our own.

See that mother, wary but fulfilled.
See that eager wonder; its wee paws.
A moment might be forever, and enough.

Not a writer is a better thing. There’s pain that writers say they solve. There’s joy that writers say they find. But where are solutions? Where is happiness? If I were a writer I’d have to explain what I do not know.

It’s time for us to wake up to thermodynamics and economics.

A human being at rest runs on 90 watts.
A hunter-gatherer would use about 250 watts.
Life in America requires around 11,000 watts per capita.

That’s like covering the Earth with seven billion blue whales !

Are we headed for success? Or a lasting economic depression on an overheated planet?

“…the wealth of civilization has a direct link to how much energy we can consume.”

University of Utah’s Dr. Tim Garrett has found that about 10 miliwatts is required for every inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar.

Tim Garrett’s latest paper is a significant shock:

“There are no plausible, thermodynamically supported solutions that avoid inflation rates less than 100% and lead to stabilized atmospheric CO2 concentrations within this century.

“It is only with very rapid decarbonization that current economic growth conditions can be sustained while keeping CO2 levels below 1000 ppmv by century’s end.”

There’s a basic law of the physical universe. It is through energy transformations that anything happens. [pdf, http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0428]