the duchy of hetkettle trophish

i stole somebody’s car

at 28 i took a bicycle for a joyride

what kind of life is that?

Anthropogenic biomes [pdf] point to a necessary turnaround in ecological science and education, especially for North Americans. Beginning with the first mention of ecology in school, the biosphere has long been depicted as being composed of natural biomes, perpetuating an outdated view of the world as “natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them”. Although this model has long been challenged by ecologists, especially in Europe and Asia, and by those in other disciplines, it remains the mainstream view. Anthropogenic biomes tell a completely different story, one of “human systems, with natural ecosystems embedded within them”. This is no minor change in the story we tell our children and each other. Yet it is necessary for sustainable management of the biosphere in the 21st century.

Anthropogenic biomes clearly show the inextricable intermingling of human and natural systems almost everywhere on Earth’s terrestrial surface, demonstrating that interactions between these systems can no longer be avoided in any substantial way.

via.

•ps. see it through google earth et al.

•pps. from there, visiting from here:

The environmental movement’s founding father, John Muir, was himself a Wisconsin farm boy, and he did not so much flee the farm for the wilderness as invent wilderness as a counter-image to the farm on which his brutal father nearly worked him to death. Muir worked later as a shepherd and lumber-miller in the Sierra Nevada and much later married into an orchard-owning family, but he didn’t have much to say about work, and what little he did say wasn’t positive. The wilderness he sought was solitary, pure, and set apart from human society, corporeal sustenance, and human toil — which is why he had to forget about the Indians who were still subsisting on the land there. This apartness and forgetting so beautifully codified in Ansel Adams’s wilderness photographs has shaped the vision of much of the environmental movement since them.

The Sierra Club, which Muir cofounded with a group of University of California professors in 1892, saw nature as not where one lived or worked but where one vacationed. And traditional American environmentalism still largely imagines nature as vacationland and as wilderness, ignoring the working landscapes and agricultural lands, whose beauties and meanings are widely celebrated in European art. More recently, as environmentalists have found themselves dealing with more systemic problems — pesticides, acid rain — they’ve begun to shed the sense that the rural and urban, human and wild, are separate in ecological terms, but that awareness has done little to actually connect rural and urban people and issues.

another good sign.

the question is not “which one” but “how many”

and for what

“i don’t see why not. they did build it.”

•ps. “well then if obama’s elected, i don’t want to hear any more talk of reparations. that’s the last favor anybody does those people!”

in a love note to my very brave ghost, here, talking about the high precision of campaign fundraising:

with enough political bandwidth for millions or even billions of tiny steps, users can finally interact with their would-be representatives according to their own momentary microprinciples.

that joke — based on the ghost’s long debauchery of picking the wings off grameen bugs — well, people are writing me about it, so i thought i’d throw it in google.

Three econometricians went out hunting and came across a large deer. The first econometrician fired, but missed, by a meter to the left. The second econometrician fired but also missed, by a meter to the right. The third econometrician didn’t fire, but shouted in triumph, “We got it! We got it!”

Transition is defined as the process of moving from a state-enterprise economy to a market economy. The emphasis is on growing a market economy starting from basic microprinciples. The model described in this report extends and modifies the capabilities of Aspen, a new agent-based model that is being developed at Sandia National Laboratories on a massively parallel Paragon computer. Aspen is significantly different from traditional models of the economy. Aspen’s emphasis on disequilibrium growth paths, its analysis based on evolution and emergent behavior rather than on a mechanistic view of society, and its use of learning algorithms to simulate the behavior of some agents rather than an assumption of perfect rationality make this model well-suited for analyzing economic variables of interest from transition economies.

In a short text named On authority (which could be read as an unexpected precursor to Benjamin’s notion of revolutionary violence) Engels deals with the problem of discipline, authority and violence. In opposition to anarchism — that is, to a doctrine that abolishes legitimity of every authority — Engels asserts that authority is a necessary ingredient of every complex process of production.… at first, Engels deals with the problem of authority versus freedom in a sphere of material production, that is, in a sphere that ex definitio doesn’t allow the freedom from all authoritarian constraints. It is an authority that is inscribed in the very tissue of material production, indivisible from the process of production. But then Engels turns to the sphere of politics — and as philosophy Aristotle to Hegel teaches, this is is the sphere contrary to that of production: it is a place where freedom is the principle of structuration. When we read On Authority, we anticipate the following turn: surely, the place of material production is governed by the principle of discipline and order, but on contrary, the freedom of political is where we, the true socialists and anarchists, agree. But in text we encounter exactly the opposite: the political is precisely the place where the true authoritarian principle shows itself. It is not mere internal function, localised in the procedure of production or in any other “microcosmos”: it is terror in its pure form, free of any functionality or “material conditions”.

•ps. forgot one:

Detailed microsociological studies of everyday life activity raise the challenge of making macrosociological concepts fully empirical by translating them into aggregates of micro-events. Micro-evidence and theoretical critiques indicate that human cognitive capacity is limited. Hence actors facing complex contingencies rely largely upon tacit assumptions and routine. The routines of physical property and organizational authority are upheld by actors’ tacit monitoring of social coalitions. Individuals continuously negotiate such coalitions in chains of interaction rituals in which conversations create symbols of group membership. Every encounter is a marketpace in which individuals tacitly match conversational and emotional resources acquired from previous encounters. Individuals are motivated to move toward those ritual encounters in which their microresources pay the greatest emotional returns until they reach personal equilibrium points at which their emotional returns stabilize or decline. Large-scale changes in social structure are produced by aggregate changes in the three types of microresources: increases in generalized culture due to new communications media or specialized culture-producing activities; new “techologies” of emotional production; and new particularized cultures (individual reputations) due to dramatic, usually conflictual, events. A method of macrosampling the distribution of microresources is proposed.

i wonder if the author contributed to programming “deep market” up there.

•pps. probly should call it deep enron.

i’m not even a doctor and i know that. time to make peace with your inner gorilla.

is how it changes, later; i wonder if every moment becomes less egotistical with time or only those we notice

the washington times spins it:

Officials in the United States and El Salvador fear that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez plans to use his nation’s oil wealth to back the presidential candidate from the Marxist FMLN, which waged an armed insurgency during the 1980s.

but just foreign policy’s news blog shreds that:

The article largely conflates the allegation that Venezuela intends to finance the FMLN’s campaign with the quite plausible claim that Venezuela intends to aid FMLN-controlled municipalities with discounted fuel, which could indeed help the FMLN politically. But a standard by which the latter constitutes political invervention would not reflect well on U.S. aid programs.

that’s not what i’m seeing. i’m seeing washington retrogrades looking at people cutting each other deals on energy and saying, “us, or nobody.” here we go into the big world-round bucket brigade, with the fuckheads drilling holes in the buckets not from our store.

should we go to war with venezuela, because they don’t inflict market rates on poor people, in the face of a disaster? it’s not really a should kind of question. either you manufacture scarcity for a living or you don’t. start from one of those two points; go whichever way you think is forward.

expect better of them — who would — when they’ve shoved heads in sand to hide how they’re licking their lips — oh, to play the shock doctrine in every country at once, another chance to double down in another rigged game, what wouldn’t they risk?

the losses in iraq were minimal. the contracts live on.…

apr 4. can’t stop the hole drilling. starting to feel like there’s a choice between death and an emissions “race to the bottom.”

“… is that because i am a paranoid asshole?”

ok, fine, he lives in france. it’s not like he was sitting beside an octopus or anything.