How wild would it be if something once so fun and inspiring became a rejected afterthought due to all the cynical profit-mongering and slop attached to it?
Publics may finally be getting wise to the fact that the long-term economic benefits of hosting mega-events like the Olympics or the World Cup are usually negligible at best. This is going to mean that fewer democratic countries will make bids for them and the ones that do, like Brazil, will do so in the face of widespread popular opposition. For the Winter Olympics, where thanks to weather and geography, the number of potential hosts is small (and thanks to climate change getting smaller), the problem will be more acute.
I try to make this point (and the point in my headline above) to people quite often, but never with such dead-on metaphor:
Owners and sponsors in any context are at best the sausage makers of sports. You don’t want to see them, much less know how they got into a position to buy a team, put astonishing athletes on it and make the tasty meat you, the sports consumer, devour happily. Generally speaking: The less you have to deal with them as a fan, the better. You do not need to see shots of the Kraft family in the box at Patriots games. You do not need to hear owners’ acceptance speeches after winning, or introduce the bowl game as a sponsor, or wheel Michael Vick out in a wheelchair yourself. You don’t care as long as the team competes and the owners and sponsors do not embarrass you for your loyalty to their products.*
Two scientific papers released on Monday by the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters came to similar conclusions by different means. Both groups of scientists found that West Antarctic glaciers had retreated far enough to set off an inherent instability in the ice sheet, one that experts have feared for decades. NASA called a telephone news conference Monday to highlight the urgency of the findings.
[…]
Those six glaciers alone could cause the ocean to rise four feet as they disappear, Dr. Rignot said, possibly within a couple of centuries. He added that their disappearance will most likely destabilize other sectors of the ice sheet, so the ultimate rise could be triple that.
As usual, the believed causes are complex and multi-layered. Bu that doesn’t make for good sound bites.
And while the cause of the stronger winds is somewhat unclear, many researchers consider human-induced global warming to be a significant factor. The winds help to isolate Antarctica and keep it cold at the surface, but as global warming proceeds, that means a sharper temperature difference between the Antarctic and the rest of the globe. That temperature difference provides further energy for the winds, which in turn stir up the ocean waters.
The oil industry provides the lifeblood of modern civilization, and bestselling books have been written about the industry and even individual companies in it, like ExxonMobil. But the modern oil industry is an amazingly shady meeting ground of fixers, gangsters, dictators, competing governments, and multinational corporations, and until now, no book has set out to tell the story of this largely hidden world.
The global fleet of some 11,000 tankers—that’s tripled during the past decade—moves approximately 2 billion metric tons of oil annually. And every stage of the route, from discovery to consumption, is tainted by corruption and violence, even if little of that is visible to the public.
Based on trips to New York, Washington, Houston, London, Paris, Geneva, Phnom Penh, Dakar, Lagos, Baku, and Moscow, among other far-flung locals, The Secret World of Oil includes up-close portraits of a shadowy Baku-based trader; a high-flying London fixer; and an oil dictator’s playboy son who has to choose one of his eleven luxury vehicles when he heads out to party in Los Angeles. Supported by funding from the prestigious Open Society, this is both an entertaining global travelogue and a major work of investigative reporting.
“Sea level rise is our reality in Miami Beach,” said the city’s mayor, Philip Levine. “We are past the point of debating the existence of climate change and are now focusing on adapting to current and future threats.”
In acknowledging the problem, politicians must endorse a solution, but the only major policy solutions to climate change — taxing or regulating the oil, gas and coal industries — are anathema to the base of the Republican Party. Thus, many Republicans, especially in Florida, appear to be dealing with the issue by keeping silent.
Ice age coming, ice age coming ‘
–Let me hear both sides, let me hear both sides, let me hear both–’ Ice age coming, ice age coming ‘
–Throw ‘em in the fire
Throw ‘em on the–’
We’re not scaremongering
This is really happening
Happening …
… ‘Here I’m allowed
Everything all of the time
Here I’m allowed
Everything all of the time‘”
–Radiohead, “Idioteque“
I’m not totally sure what this tells us (or astronomers), and I certainly am not clued enough to understand it, but damn is it still cool:
Scientists have created the first realistic model of the universe, capable of recreating 13 billion years of cosmic evolution. The simulation is called “Illustris,” and it renders the universe as a cube (350 million light-years on each side) with, its creators say, unprecedented resolution: The virtual universe uses 12 billion 3-D “pixels,” or resolution elements, to create its rendering. And that rendering includes both normal matter and dark matter.
How they use it? The Atlantic continues:
With Illustris, paper co-author Shy Genel explains it, “We can go forward and backward in time. We can pause the simulation and zoom into a single galaxy or galaxy cluster to see what’s really going on.”
Illustris has 41,000 galaxies in its simulation—a mix of spiral galaxies like our Milky Way along with elliptical galaxies. It represents five years of work on the part of the scientists from, among others, the MIT/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies in Germany.
And naturally, that Orb-like soundtrack is by a band from Germany, Moonboot.
Sometimes I wonder if the world’s so small,
That we can never get away from the sprawl,
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains,
And there’s no end in sight,
I need the darkness someone please cut the lights.
“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains,” Arcade Fire
This op/ed is ostensibly about the Ethan Couch case (drunk, likely entitled 16-year-old mows runs over four bystanders, gets off with probation), but has lovely damnation of white flight and the isolated sense of unreality that results:
There, with a consumerist bravado later immortalized in Michael Elmgreen’s and Ingar Dragset’s “Prada Marfa” sculpture, islands of shopping centers were installed in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by oceans of subdivisions.
Driving north from Dallas or Fort Worth, you will eventually arrive at an outpost of the Cheesecake Factory, the only conceivable end for a rainbow that never was. There, at the crossroads of bourgeois comfort and ennui, these plastic fiefs — confederations of chain restaurants, multiplex cinemas and roadside churches — compose a ring of suburbs that are masterpieces in the art of urban control. In 2011, Money magazine recommended moving to the suburb of Keller, Tex., because, if you did, “you’d never know there had been a recession.”
Who are we to judge what one’s sense of “home” is? We all seek whatever comfort and familiarity that makes us feel “home.” Even the snark-the-suburbs Arcade Fire song noted above encourages “Come and find your kind,” which is its own kind of self-segregation, even if it theoretically has “more purpose” than a petty suburban brand interest.
That said, the sanitized, commoditized, vanilla obliviousness of our suburban enclaves does encourage a certain dissociation from the “real” world around us — be it nature or actual human experience, no?
The “Affluenza Society” piece concludes:
The case of Ethan Couch is many things, but perhaps most important it is a metaphor for the dark side of suburban cosmology, for every other barricaded enclave like Keller — places that, if not entirely above the law, are somehow removed from it. Even after four deaths by the side of the road.
Brad Walker, rivers director for the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, said that isn’t the point. Walker said people shouldn’t be building on the bottomland, which are the rivers’ own creation and where floods are supposed to go.
“We don’t really ever learn that lesson, and even if we do, we forget it very quickly,” Walker said. “Even if you build a bigger levee, all you do is move the flood somewhere else.”
It’s not a novel concept. But collectively, humans are bad at:
Thinking about future consequences in the face of near-term gains
Working together to share responsibility for those consequences
Giving a damn about future generations, other than as lip service to avoid taxes
I’ve rambled about (re)building on Chesterfield’s Missouri River flood plain before — now we have two new outlet malls in the area! — but of course the money and incentive were there to build an even bigger levee, so up it went. The problem is, as noted in the article, that just pushes the problem to someone else’s yard.
The super individualistic American bent does not tend to embrace collective efforts that ostensibly benefit someone over there. So we’ll keep doing it. We’ll keep building.
Because can you really put a price on access to strip malls?
Oh, how clever and typically devious: Use the least informed, most zealous demographic to help obstruct any legislative progress for the past four, six years, then as mid-terms approach and another shot at the presidency nears, decide “Gee, maybe we should think about actually governing again.”
Republican leaders and their corporate allies have launched an array of efforts aimed at diminishing the clout of the party’s most conservative activists and promoting legislation instead of confrontation next year.
GOP House leaders are taking steps to impose discipline on wavering committee chairmen and tea-party factions. Meanwhile, major donors and advocacy groups, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads, are preparing an aggressive effort to groom and support more centrist Republican candidates for Congress in 2014’s midterm elections.
At the same time, party leaders plan to push legislative proposals—including child tax credits and flextime for hourly workers—designed to build the party’s appeal among working families.
The efforts, at the national and state levels, come at the end of a year of infighting and legislative brinkmanship, capped by the 16-day government shutdown in October that drove the party’s image to historic lows.
Thanks for wasting our time and turning yet more people off politics, shattering remnant hopes of so many who dared enter the game to try to make a difference instead of make a buck.
Even better: Pitch your mouthpiece Wall Street Journal on how you intend to change, and you totally mean it this time.
“Our No. 1 focus is to make sure, when it comes to the Senate, that we have no loser candidates,” said the business group’s top political strategist, Scott Reed. “That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket.”
Yeah, good luck with that. May you reap what you’ve sowed for far too many years.
Reminds me of that time when it was cool to rip Al Gore for “hugging trees” and then … yada yada yada 20 years later here come the seas. Whoops!
Fall of Because 