the hetkettle trophish

whew! good thing all we had to do was say it! ugh.

the dirty trio: cars, coal, buildings. one of these is harder than the oth-ers. 100+ million homes and more buildings besides. how, how, how.

obviously you got your discounts and costs, you got your subsidies and your fees, you got your up-to-date building codes, your only-green materials, all that.

me, what i’d do, is send people around to every house in every neighborhood with a survey — a combination, actually, of a home amenities census and a conversation about the future. train somebody in every neighborhood to do this. emphasizing that while we’re a little beyond your usual green tips stuff, the objective is still to save people money while saving the planet.

“oh, now’s not a good time? when’s a good time.”

have meetings beforehand, to tell about the project.

then when the surveys start coming back, start in with the certified inspections and recommendations for the energy-thrifty house. then coordinating, scheduling, supplying, building, re-inspecting.

do whole areas at once, to encourage community planning, beyond the basics. maybe it costs too much for somebody to fix — where would that person or family go? would you unbuild the houses that were truly nasty, to supply infill development? (i would.)

what are we supposed to do, turn our backs on all the entrepreneurial possibilities? business is a uniquely human response to a moral or cosmic crisis. whether it’s a tsunami or a sustained aerial bombardment, there’s the same urgent call for urban renewal.

— war, inc., 2008

vzz vzz vzz vzzzz

“there’s the same urgent call for urban renewal.”

heaven has a special place for the cusacks now, for this movie.

at the trade show they’re selling an electric kitchen appliance called the interrogation grille. no doubt it’s the best way to roast nuts.

out, about, yesterday. car repairs, from the break-in, led to greasy breakfast and iphone prose by the bay, the dirty side where only working boats and baseball fans go. then again to return the car to regular service, dinner with good people, short beckett plays with good people, walking on dark wet grass near the cool midnight waters with good people, with jokes, and, i have no idea why, the rest of the night re-watching the spider-man movies. being bored from one o’clock to dawn seemed like right. and drinking beer.

and where are we again? still with the question marks?

and the hurrying downhill?

as a carbon tax rises toward superfluous, the installation process for large wind turbines may change, the carbon footprint of portland cement slowly jacking up the price of standard concrete, right? and that’s ok.

peak me.

if it turns out i’m the critical resource gap between prosperity and devastation, the world is in huge trouble from which it can’t escape.

the only way i can think for you to soften this risk is to — no. there is no way.

Clearly, there are many important issues to reflect on as South–South research collaboration matures. In some instances, collaboration, however attractive, may not be appropriate. In other circumstances major hurdles may significantly reduce its chances of success.

appropriate managerial technology transfer is common shelter from the storm.

ps. it’s my duty as an american to take cheap shots at china.

pps. but seriously, i don’t like zero-sustainability for them, why would i like it for everybody.

to build a fission electrical plant in the basement. it should be enough to power this part of town and maybe also the bus line on fulton. for cooling i’ll use the hose on the back of the building, we’ll work out some schedule so people can water their gardens and wash their electric cars off-peak so there’s no meltdown. so really all i need now is nuclear fuel and maybe a hundred million bucks? two hundred? five, tops. anyway i’ll get the neighborhood business association to float a bond, we’ll get investors later. once they hear how much it’ll cost and that it’ll only take ten years to bring online, and how downstairs’s locked most of the time and built of solid cement, they’ll spring for it. they’re sensible people.

and it’s quite another to say you’re in some active way going to destroy it, which is what we keep hearing over and over again from the White House and from most of the media. In terms of what Ahmadinejad is saying to Iranians in Iran, what is the real meaning of what he’s saying?

to a new york cabbie. about the difference between the ozone hole and global climate change. said it was the difference between a hole in your roof and your house being on fire. that seemed clear enough, but came the question, “how’d it start, the fire?”

took me a minute but i said, “you do a little work on this car yourself?”

“sure. check oil, cables, coolant. like that.”

“what’d'you do with the oily rags, when you’re done, leave ‘em around?”

“oh hell no. put those in the red waste bin. get them cleaned or tossed. safely.”

“ok. so what if i tell you every smokestack and tailpipe in america, all around the world, is spewing out invisible oily rags, all the time the motor’s running. just leaving them everywhere. you tell me: what started the fire?”

reputation.

what a fucked up place this is, you know? sometimes i can’t even speak, facing our confusion. yeah, fuck yeah, it’s ours. whose else would it be.

this is from a set of interviews. it’s in west virginia, before the primary election. “obama faces racism in west virginia: many blue collar democrats are not ready for a black president.” but this is wild. i’m beefing up their transcript to include more of the cross-talk. janet is making an effort, from the side.

TRACY, CLINTON SUPPORTER: My opinion is I think the United States of America should be run by somebody from the United States of America.

JANET: But—

REPORTER: But he’s from the US.

JANET: Right.

REPORTER: He’s born here. He’s been raised here.

JANET: Right.

TRACY: But he’s Muslim.

JANET: But—

REPORTER: But why do you think he’s Muslim? He wasn’t raised Muslim.

TRACY: But I don’t agree with that. —I just — I don’t—

JANET: You feel like there’s a lie behind that.

TRACY: Yeah, I don’t agree with that.

JANET: I understand that.—

REPORTER: Do you think that’s a smear tactic in politics, to label him as Muslim?

TRACY: I think it is a smear tactic.

REPORTER: I mean, but—

JANET: Do you—

TRACY: Yeah, I do think it’s a smear tactic, but — I think we have the right to know. I mean, I think we have the right to know everything in their background.

REPORTER: Will you get behind Obama if he does win the nomination?

TRACY: No.

JANET: You would go—

REPORTER: Why not?

TRACY: No. I’ll go Republican.

REPORTER: You would vote for McCain.

TRACY: Yeah.

REPORTER: And why — what’s that decision for you.

TRACY: I just— I just don’t agree. That’s — I’ll just leave it at that. I just don’t agree that he should be president of the United States.

ok, first, this’sn’t my first time hearing people talk about “smear tactic” as though the phrase meant the accusations were true and people were mad at the accuser for being impolitic. (maybe this comes from the generation-long, now, history of using “politically incorrect” as a shield for lying. the self-poisoning well.)

we don’t know anything from the text about whether the two women were friends or relatives or what. the cross-talk to me says they know each other and this discussion maybe has some history, except for janet’s “i understand that” comment — which unfortunately comes during an establishing shot, breaking continuity of the soundtrack, putting the comment in a little limbo, even maybe making it hard to fully attribute to janet — anyway it says, to me, maybe, their relationship is more political, like they’re both campaign workers, or something.

so.

this interview came after two rounds of obama’s pastor making all the news. this much is clear to me: tracy has a seriously apocalyptic view of islam. she’s afraid. this is not straight white-bread supremacism or distrust. and what i’d've asked, had i been there, was to find out how she worked wright into this story about obama. did the dread stop with the non-english name — was it just about the madrassa and the whispers — or did she also think wright was tainted, for his questions about america? or did that whole thing confirm her doubts about the senator? or did she miss it?

you all know i’m big on the “iraq was behind 9/11″ legend and the “mylar moms” who bought all the plastic sheeting they could to protect their homes from imminent biological attack in 2002. maybe not mostly moms but that was the feeling i got. and the years of right wing stories about democrat collusion with enemies. cheney all but accusing kerry of conspiracy to murder his own people.

what does tracy think will happen. what is she thinking.

ps. i know. the history of they don’t want you to know the truth is long. the history of fear of outside influence is long. the history of truth through repetition is long. witch hunts. group preservation.

but i think there’s something— i think reality is broken.

overload? or maybe i’m taking the regular story-jumble more serious because of the future?

pps. on the radio, on the television, brainwashing. endlessly. call libel and lies “protected” “entertainment” and you get the world you get. the strengths of democracy — the power of many — just stops working. fantasy takes over.

but it’s not just that. well i mean it’s never just anything but here, is maybe the crux of the american problem — i think we’re gossip driven. we’re not a special separate species so that’s probably from something like “living in luxury too long” — not caring about reality — because who does — poor people — weak people.

can hear the echoes of the right wing in that. the story of fear, isolation, vulnerability. vertigo and cruelty where care and pleasure work better. the danger of abandoning faith in the ability of the state to be fair — it’s easier to walk away from ideals of fairness with a sense that imbalance is caused by external corruption than to have a simple disagreement about administrative strategy — discord’s so unpleasant — and if you associate government with society, then government failure means society is unprotected — from whatever — notice how many people who hold government in fundamental disregard have their own large institutions with which they would replace public bureaucracy.

including the ultimate — a hierarchy of incontrovertible angels, whose words have no present form — dialogue is impossible — but it’s still only one input in each person’s life — the variation of results is striking, huh?

democracy is a set of theories of government but it’s also an unmistakable fact of human life. many experiences, many stories, many contributions, many ways.

you can’t help but ask yourself, can this whole thing be lifted up and moved. do we require an enemy to make us get up and go. the assholes say so. the assholes use comfort and discomfort, pleasure and pain, nearness and distance, not really carrots and sticks. they treasure you, but they don’t feed you, any more than a musician feeds an instrument.

that’s hard to keep in focus, about instruments. the music is great, everybody loves it; except for the trees that became the guitars. the acoustic beauty of lacquered wood is of no interest to the forest. there’s nothing really better about that point of view, either.

just older.

us, we’re like some beta test that escaped the lab.…

“nature,” echoes the pre-release wetware, “is everything’t’s dumber’n us.”