intellectual properties

good reads

the november 30th issue of the new yorker is the best one i’ve read in a while, with several articles i read all the way through. for anyone who wants some good reading, here’s 3:

1. Either/Or, by Ariel Levy, is a long but engaging article about Caster Semenya, the African track star who was recently in the news because people were questioning whether she was a woman.  the article is great because it neatly braids several things: 1. the history of sex/gender testing in sports, and relative to testing for other things (drugs, hormones, etc) 2. sex/gender issues in both Western culture and in her native culture 3. basic civil rights regarding what is private information and what is public regarding such issues 4. how much international sports have changed Africa (Mandela credits sports for breaking the racial barriers of apartheid), and 5. what does it actually mean to be a man or a woman? is it hormones? chromosomes? genitalia? some people are born with confusions of all 3.

2. The Politics of Death by Jill Lepore uses the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, who went into a coma in 1975 and her parents had to sue the hospital for rights to “pull the plug”, to discuss the idea that “The more successfully medicine has staved off death, the less well anyone has accepted dying“.  It goes into the history of the case, the complexities of what it means to be alive or not biologically, and, as the title states, the politics around dying.  the whole thing is interesting, but the most interesting point to me was that basically, before the 1950s, there wasn’t really such a thing as “life support”, and when you got really sick, you died.  usually at home.  and no one fought too much about it. but as soon a there became “life support”, people were no longer allowed to just die natural deaths, and in fact, any family asking that their child/mother/father be allowed to do so has been villainized, and now today we even have people talking about “death panels”, as if believing in natural death is somehow now akin to believing genocide is ok.

3.  A beautiful short fiction piece by Don DeLillo entitled “Midnight in Dostoevsky“.  The writing is superb. Maybe i was partial to this because i also like to talk long meandering walks, talk subjectively a lot about nothing, speculate about other people’s lives, and had a philosophy professor who only talked with his eyes closed.

the yes men: how to fix the world

if you haven’t yet seen the footage of the Yes Men’s (who?) most recent stunt with the Chamber of Commerce, it’s here and worth 10 minutes of your time.

some articles and a little about the context:
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2009/10/19/091019ta_talk_surowiecki

Resigning in protest is not in the American grain. Robert McNamara stuck around as Secretary of Defense even after he decided that the Vietnam War was a disaster; Colin Powell did the same during the Bush Administration’s push for war with Iraq; and in the lead-up to the financial crisis, few high-profile executives stepped down over disagreements in philosophy or tactics. But resigning in protest has gained popularity of late among an unlikely group: big corporations. Last Monday, Apple announced that it would be quitting the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the Chamber’s opposition to global-warming legislation. And that was just the latest in a series of defections: in the past few weeks, the public-utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources, and Exelon all announced that they’d be leaving the Chamber, while Nike quit the organization’s board of directors…

…But it may reflect a calculation that global warming is simply too big an issue to get wrong, both economically—few companies are really going to benefit from the melting of the polar ice caps—and from a public-relations point of view. It’s also probably no coincidence that these resignations have come at a time when the Chamber’s anti-regulatory zeal looks not just outmoded but self-defeating. Had the Chamber supported tougher regulation of financial and housing markets, after all, the myriad small businesses it represents would undoubtedly be better off today. And it’s far from clear that across-the-board hostility to regulation is really in the best interests of the free-enterprise system. We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business.

follow-up

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/10/the-us-chamber-of-commerce-now-90-smaller.html

for privacy reasons, i can’t say too much about my professional experience working with the Chamber of Commerce on environmental issues, but i can say that this made me very happy.

their current movie “The Yes Men Fix The World” is out now.

At Lake Scugog

1.

Where what I see comes to rest,
at the edge of the lake,
against what I think I see

and, up on the bank, who I am
maintains an uneasy truce
with who I fear I am,

while in the cabin’s shade the gap between
the words I said
and those I remember saying

is just wide enough to contain
the remains that remain
of what I assumed I knew.

2.

Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were
gingerly trades spots
with the person you are

and what I believe I believe
sits uncomfortably next to
what I believe.

When I promised I will always give you
what I want you to want,
you heard, or desired to hear,

something else. As, over and in the lake,
the cormorant and its image
traced paths through the sky.

–Troy Jollimore

~in the new yorker

green lies

i’ve noticed more and more recently how when you start looking for something, you see it all over the place.

anyway, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, one of the things that’s been at the top of my mind for a while is greenwashing, and so now i see it everywhere. on the plus side, it’s great that so many companies are finally realizing that they need to be (or at least promote themselves as) environmentally conscious and hopefully that eventually leads to real change, but so much of it is just pure advertising spin and not actual corporate change, and when you see it, it makes you sort of ill. i was reading NPR news this morning, and saw a little ad for Fiji water on the righthand column, directing you to their website “Fiji Green”. bottled water is a huge no-no among environmentalists, and now that everyone is so carbon calculator obsessed, bottled water FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD is especially seen as overly decadent. so Fiji water has attempted to ‘green’ their image by claiming that the ‘food miles’ calculation is a myth, based on the recent New Yorker article that pointed out some of the unexpected results when you really tabulate all the factors from production to shipping to consumption.

We here at FIJI Water hear a lot of complaints about “food miles,” ours in particular. The concept is that the longer your food travels, the worse it is for the environment.

We think this is a load of hooey…and so do scientists who have studied lifecycle carbon footprints. The key word here is lifecycle - how a product is developed or packaged, what the transport mode is, and other factors can have a far greater impact for better or worse than the mere distance traveled.

this is the real kicker:
There are still people who are choosing to “buy/eat local” and thereby actually making their environmental impact worse than it otherwise would have been.

WTF - bashing the “buy/eat local” movement?! Fiji gets a tiny bit of credit for engaging this issue with open public comments on the blog and everything, but i think this one scores pretty high on the greenwashing index.

native son

He will need to offer more than himself as cause for hope…

Obama is a black candidate who can tell Americans of all races to move beyond race. As such, he is uniquely positioned to put an end to this era, and uniquely vulnerable to becoming its latest victim.

related: the speech Obama could have given.

lazer what?

an answer to the question what kind of music is this?, which i am often asked by people who aren’t entrenched in the scene:

Megasoid calls the music “psychedelic robo crunk remix action,” Rutledge has called it “future-blap,” Poirier uses the phrase “bastard bass” (click that link for an excellent forty minute mix Poirier put together for Pitchfork magazine) and the Glitch Mob’s edIT offered the phrase “digital crunk shit.” One of the scene’s widely acknowledged godfathers, the Los Angeles DJ and producer Daddy Kev, defined the connection this way: “The affinity comes down to bass. Ridiculous bass.”

–Lazer-Guided, Sasha Frere-Jones, The New Yorker (!)

i’m going to be seeing some lazer bass tomorrow night - Modeselektor and the Glitch Mob @ MightySF.

(btw, we usually just call it “glitch”. lazers not included.)

early adopter (not)fiction

Raj, Bohemian by Hari Kunzru (New Yorker):

We liked to do things casually. We called at the last minute. We messaged one another from our hand-held devices. Sometimes our names were on exclusive guest lists (though we were poor, we were beautiful, and people liked to have us around), but often we preferred to do something else—attend a friend’s opening, drink in after-hours clubs or the room above a pub, trek off to remote suburbs to see a band play in a warehouse. We went dancing whenever we felt like it (none of us had regular jobs), and when we didn’t we stayed in, watching movies and getting high. Someone always had something new or special—illegal pre-releases of Hollywood blockbusters, dubs of 8-mm. shorts from the nineteen-seventies. We watched next summer’s exploding airplanes, Viennese Actionists masturbating onto operating tables. Raw meat and Nick Cage. Whatever we watched was, by definition, good, because we’d watched it, because it had belonged—at least, temporarily—to us. By the time the wider world caught up—which always happened, sooner or later—we’d usually got bored and moved on. We had long since given up mourning the loss of our various enthusiasms. We’d learned to discard them lightly. It was the same with clubs and bars. Wherever we went would be written about in magazines three or four months later. A single mention on a blog, and a place that had been spangled with beautiful, interesting faces would be swamped by young bankers in button-down shirts, nervously analyzing the room to see if they were having fun.

I must make it clear that we didn’t plan for our lives to be this way. We despised trendies—fashion kids who tried too hard, perennially hoping to get hosed down by the paps or interviewed about their hair. With us, it wasn’t a neurotic thing. We put on public events—salons, gigs, parties, shows. But once in a while, in the midst of our hectic social gyrations, we liked to do something for one another, something that didn’t drain our energy, that made us feel private again…

a beautifully written peek into lives that i have lived and the weights - whether real or perceived - behind the things people like me do and how we value them, and how sometimes those values can overshadow what is real, or be revealed to be something altogether different than what we thought we had, and possibly even result in the realization that we are who we were trying so hard not to be. categorized as fiction, but it all rang true for me, even the dystopian twist.

thinking of all the things i have participated in that we so carefully construed as ‘underground’ and edgy that soon became popular, trendy, either by organic proliferation or purposeful profit-motivated marketing by some faction … raves, fashions, the ghetto gourmet, hooping, types of music - it seems to ring true for mostly the arts for me, not so much consumer products, but i’m sure for others that is the case. you had the coolest thing, no one else could find it anywhere, then suddenly one day you woke up and everyone had one. how did that happen? when did it become a trend, and why?

My taste had been central to my identity. I’d cultivated it, kept it fed and watered like an exotic flowering plant. Now I realized that what I thought had been an expression of my innermost humanity was nothing but a cloud of life-style signals, available to anyone at the click of a mouse. How had this happened?

(if you read to the end of the story, it explains a bit more about how i feel about Facebook and why i don’t think it’s the best thing ever (marketing gimmicks disguised as personal communication? gah!), although i know some who heartily agree with monetizing your social networks.)

definitely one of the best things i’ve read in quite some time, so thx to b2 for pointing it out.

(also file under: what is real v. what’s your damage?)

straight talk

Many conservatives are anguished about the prospect of a McCain Presidency. Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator from Pennsylvania, has summarized the right’s case against McCain. “He has opposed pro-growth tax cuts and supported limits on political speech,” Santorum wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week. “He has pushed amnesty when it came to illegal immigration and half-measures when it came to interrogating terrorists. He wants to close Guantánamo and allow the reimportation of prescription drugs into the United States. Not only does he part company with conservatives on these and other issues—climate change, drilling for oil in the Alaskan hinterland, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research, international criminal courts, gun-show background checks—he invariably adopts the rhetoric of the left and stridently leads the opposition.” Working with a Democratic Congress, a President McCain could well pass half the agenda that Republicans have been fighting against for the past decade.

–On the Bus: Can John McCain reinvent Republicanism?
by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker

interesting biographical piece on McCain that talks a lot about the evolution of the GOP and its current internal conflicts.

big footprints

i think one of the reasons that many people - myself included - are skeptical about the idea of a global carbon market - in which companies/organizations/governments buy and sell their carbon emissions - is that the calculation of such a thing is so complex, nearly every eco-economist disagrees with the metrics of the others. in the same vein, for the last few years the idea of individual “carbon footprints” has been around - that each person can easily calculate how much their standard of living costs in carbon each year, or consumers can calculate whether it’s better go paper or plastic or buy a real or a fake christmas tree. websites like carbonfootprint.com make it seem like it’s a straightforward computation that anyone who cares enough should be able to figure out. but is it? for example, which is greener:

1. For a New Yorker to buy a French wine, or a California wine?

2. For a Londoner to buy English lamb, or lamb imported from New Zealand?

Proponents of the local food movement would probably that in both cases, buying the product produced in your own country is always the best choice, using the logic that buying food produced closer to you is greener because it is transported a shorter distance:

It is a logical and widely held assumption that the ecological impacts of transporting food—particularly on airplanes over great distances—are far more significant than if that food were grown locally. There are countless books, articles, Web sites, and organizations that promote the idea. There is even a “100-Mile Diet,” which encourages participants to think about “local eating for global change.” Eating locally produced food has become such a phenomenon, in fact, that the word “locavore” was just named the 2007 word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. — “Big Foot” by Michael Specter

however, as New Yorker Big Foot article discusses, beginning with one British grocery chain’s challenge to put a carbon sticker on every one of its 70,000 products showing how much carbon was used to produce that product, once the math really gets going, the results are often surprising. due to differences in transportation, energy production, and farming practices, in both cases above the answer is that it’s greener to buy the product produced on the other side of the ocean (see article for details).

The article also talks about other important aspects of this debate, such as the sometimes confusing line between science and morality:
Possessing an excessive carbon footprint is rapidly becoming the modern equivalent of wearing a scarlet letter. Because neither the goals nor acceptable emissions limits are clear, however, morality is often mistaken for science. A recent article in New Scientist suggested that the biggest problem arising from the epidemic of obesity is the additional carbon burden that fat people—who tend to eat a lot of meat and travel mostly in cars—place on the environment. Australia briefly debated imposing a carbon tax on families with more than two children; the environmental benefits of abortion have been discussed widely (and simplistically). Bishops of the Church of England have just launched a “carbon fast,” suggesting that during Lent parishioners, rather than giving up chocolate, forgo carbon. (Britons generate an average of a little less than ten tons of carbon per person each year; in the United States, the number is about twice that.)

“People tell me, well, these are bad guys, and corporate guys who just want to buy the right to pollute are bad, too, and we should not be giving them incentives to stop. But we need to address the problems that exist, not drown in fear or lose ourselves in morality. Behavior changes when you offer incentives. If you want to punish people for being bad corporate citizens, you should go to your local church or synagogue and tell God to punish them. Because that is not our problem. Our problem is global warming, and my job is to reduce greenhouse gases at the lowest possible cost. I say solve the problem and deal with the bad guys somewhere else.”

as well as the tension between environmentalists vs. technological progress:
‘The trouble with you environmentalists is that you see a problem coming and you slam your foot on the brakes and try and steer away from the chasm. The problem is that it often doesn’t work. Maybe the thing to do is jam your foot on the pedal and see if you can just jump across.’ At the time, I thought he was crazy, but as I get older I realize what he was talking about. The whole green movement in technology is in that space. It is an attempt to jump across the chasm.

it’s a long article, but a great read that touches on a lot of the ideas around not only the carbon market but ways of thinking about dealing with global warming (note: we can’t stop it. even if we stopped all greenhouse gas production today, the earth would still continue to warm because of what we’ve already done. we need to DEAL with it). halfway through, i started to get a little exhausted. how can any average consumer, then, be expected to make a good judgment? will the market drive change if no one understands the market? are consumers too overwhelmed, and is it government’s job to regulate? where is the middle? i think the carbon market is definitely PART of the solution, but as previously noted, there are a lot of things it leaves out (like equity), and as discussed here, the calculation is really like hitting a moving target.

however, i do have more hope than i used to about humanity moving forward in a progressive (not regressive) and sustainable way. 2 years ago i was pretty much with the fatalists who were pretty sure we were all totally screwed (damn Al Gore and his depressing movie) unless we all became Amish or something. now, i see dim lights of hope.

obama hearts CTL

a follow-up political footnote to the post on synthetic crude for you Obama fans: the New Yorker article reports that from extraction–> production process–>use, a barrel of Coal to Liquid (CTL) fuel (another fuel process being heavily invested in) creates 2x as many total greenhouse gas emissions as a barrel of conventional oil. Barack Obama, along with republican senator Dunning from kentucky, put forward the Coal to Liquid Fuel Promotion Act in January:

U.S. Senators Jim Bunning (R-KY) and Barack Obama (D-IL) today introduced the “Coal-To-Liquid Fuel Promotion Act of 2007.” This bipartisan piece of legislation is based on the bill first introduced by Senators Bunning and Obama last spring and would help create the infrastructure needed for large-scale production of Coal-to-Liquids (CTL) fuel. It is a comprehensive bill that expands tax incentives, creates planning assistance, and develops Department of Defense support for the domestic CTL industry.

“This bi-partisan piece of legislation that I have re-introduced with Senator Obama today will lay out a plan for the 110th Congress on how we need to work together for energy independence. CTL technology offers America the chance to capitalize on an abundant domestic resource that is found in eastern and western Kentucky and across the country. To help spread the message of how important the CTL process is for energy independence Senator Obama and I will form the Senate Coal-to-Liquid Fuel Caucus to help lead this fight. With a strong investment in CTL, America will wean itself off of foreign sources of energy, and at the same time create jobs for working families back home. CTL is a viable, environmentally friendly energy resource that will help cure America’s addiction to oil.”

since when are coal mines environmentally friendly? not to mention that the CTL process is extremely energy consumptive and produces all kinds of toxins and emissions. i like how they frame it as an “environmentally friendly energy resource” based on the final product being cleaner, ignoring the source and process by which it is produced.

after much criticism, obama backpeddled to say he will only support clean(er) CTL plants. to me, this move is barack obama catering to a special interest/industry in order to gain votes from the other side, and then trying to wiggle out of it when challenged by his voter base, and that pisses me off. more on this and barack’s environmental tendencies (not all bad): http://www.blueclimate.com/blueclimate/2007/06/barack-obama-re.html and http://www.grist.org/feature/2007/07/30/obama/ .