Mismanagement and grief (unhappy anniversary)

This blog got its start three years ago, mostly in reaction to the Katrina diaster. Looks like history is quite predictably repeating itself. Oh well, good luck to the people in affected areas, you will need it. At least you know what to expect from your government.

As I remarked on another blog:

Nothing like a few floating corpses to spice up convention coverage. Of course, if Americans didn’t have the attention span of meth-addicted chickens, we’d remember them from three years ago.

And as Auden remarked on September 1, 1939:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed them all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

A blogoversary is an excuse to go back and read the archives and look for common themes and try to figure out just what the hell this blog is about and whether it is worth pursuing:

• atheism, naturalism, philosophy in general


• politics


• economics, libertarianism


• doom, boom, futurism


• social networks, netarchy, solidarity, coordination, collective action


• media, the web, googlectualism, infoglut, attention management


• technology, coding, hacks, standards, knowledge representation


• right-wing loons

I'm sure these all have something to do with one another, other than occupying space in my disorderly brain.

Addendum: and so it begins?

My review of The Long Emergency reads a little bit more negative than I intended. On the whole, I think Kunstler should be taken seriously -- all of the trends he points to are real, the ability of our economy and infrastructure to adapt rapidly is dubious, and there's a good chance that things can get as fucked up as he predicts.

And as if to start the proceedings off, today's paper reveals that

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. warned Friday that Northern California home heating bills would leap 70.8 percent in October as hurricanes Katrina and Rita drive up natural gas prices nationwide.

and electricity prices along with it.

But take heart, all the news is not bad (if you read to the end)

The weather may provide Californians some consolation. Long-range forecasts from the National Weather Service call for higher than normal temperatures through December, said David Reynolds, meteorologist in charge of the service's Monterey office.

See? What global warming taketh, global warming restoreth. Sort of-eth.

Update: All Gulf oil output shut down
(thanks Ken)

Welcome to Earth 2.0

Living in America means being isolated from reality in so many ways. Poverty is invisible, for the most part. Nature is beautiful and disneyfied. Technology provides us with an endless stream of toys. The past has a shallow grip; our culture is one of endless escape and reinvention, and we get to think of history as a series of triumphs and progress. Evil and suffering happen out there, on other continents.

That's why 9/11 was such a shock -- people aren't supposed to hate us, and they certainly aren't supposed to attack us here. And New Orleans -- which I don't think we've processed yet -- is a similar shock. Nature isn't supposed to intrude on our lives in such a dramatic fashion. There have been plenty of previous hurricanes and other natural disasters, but we've always been on top of them. Not any more.

Bill McKibben has more on this theme

Our rulers have insisted by both word and deed that the laws of physics and chemistry do not apply to us. That delusion will now start to vanish. Katrina marks Year One of our new calendar, the start of an age in which the physical world has flipped from sure and secure to volatile and unhinged. New Orleans doesn't look like the America we've lived in. But it very much resembles the planet we will inhabit the rest of our lives.

Water and Risk

Continuing on the theme of reality-based urban planning in flood zones, here's an excellent post comparing the Dutch approach to flood control and land reclamation with the American variety.

This line:

A society accepting much greater risks is built upon the expectation of quicker returns on investment. To those without a penny to invest it means risk without returns.

leaped out at me because it directly links to another article I read recently and wish I had time to reply to in detail: Paul Graham's latest piece, Inequality and Risk, which (to oversimplify) argues for more risk and economic inequality as the only way to spur economic growth. This article is more nuanced and better argued than the usual libertarian blige, but still pushes my buttons. I'm usually an admirer of Graham but sometimes he goes horribly wrong and I think this is one of those times. But what do I know, I haven't made a fortune yet. Aside from the merits of his argument (later on that), it's a pretty disingenuous move to argue in favor of risk when you personally have already moved to a risk-free economic level.

Keywords: katrina, risk, libertarianism

Anarchy and mutual aid

The emergence of tribes in state-free New Orleans (from Boing-boing)

NEW ORLEANS — In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor.

As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods - humanity.

"Some people became animals," Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White's Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. "We became more civilized.

While state-sanctioned violence continues in cruder forms than usual:

Police came through commandeering drivable vehicles and siphoning gas. Officials took over a hotel and ejected the guests.

An officer pumped his shotgun at a group trying to return to their hotel on Chartres Street.

"This is our block," he said, pointing the gun down a side street. "Go that way."

They say disaster uncovers real social relations (presumably, by overturning the everyday structures of survival and forcing people to spontaneously create new, crude, temporary ones where the mechanisms are more obvious).

Meanwhile California is stepping up (and presumably many other locales and individuals are doing the same).

Keywords: anarchy, self-organization, human nature, katrina