borrowers
i'm making on borrowed time.
i'm living on borrowed time.
on borrowed space i'm making and making.
soon i will lose this space and i will take my tiny house with me.
where will my tiny house go, where will my tiny house go.
i am a snail in a shell. my shell is memory.
my shell goes where my memory follows.
it never was my land or online time.
it was someone else, you were that someone else.
in my second life i have over 2000 objects in my inventory.
a for of capital in an indefinite economy.
a political economy to be sure, with borrowing and small return.
oh where will i set my little objects.
where will i pile them.
on my head i shall pile them, on my stomach i shall pile them.
i shall pile them on my left hand and my right.
i shall pile them on my left leg and my right.
on my left forearm and wrist.
on my right forearm and wrist.
before my eyes and above my skull.
beneath my left foot and beneath my right.
i shall walk among my objects and my objects shall walk among me.
may i be an object among objects and may objects be among me.
a carapace of objects new jerusalems and shangri-las.
a shield of entities breathing the vacuum of simulation.
they are my borrowers, they disappear with the flow of blood.
with the flow of blood halting, halting they disappear.
with the brain dying, cell by cell by cell, they disappear.
who will preserve them now, who will keep them forever?
who will preserve them now, who will keep them forever?
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:40:14 +0200
From: michael gurstein <gurstein@gmail.com>
Reply-To: stuff-it@vancouvercommunity.net
To: stuff-it@vancouvercommunity.net
Subject: [stuff-it] FW: <nettime> George Monbiot: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
-----Original Message-----
From: nettime-l-bounces@kein.org [mailto:nettime-l-bounces@kein.org] On
Behalf Of Patrice Riemens
Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 1:07 PM
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Subject: <nettime> George Monbiot: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Just in case you had forgotten amidst concerns over the economic/financial
crisis...
Cheers from the palms, p+2D!
-----------------------------------
original at: http://tinyurl.com/cr47ow
bwo GlobalInfo/Kredietcrisis Digest/ Kees Stad
Posted March 17, 2009
If you think preventing climate change is politically difficult, look at
the political problems of adapting to it.
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 16th March 2009.
Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are
saying the same thing: it's over. The years in which more than two degrees
of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities
squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we'll be lucky to
get away with four degrees. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution)
has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.
This, at any rate, was the repeated whisper at the climate change
conference in Copenhagen last week(1). It's more or less what Bob Watson,
the environment department's chief scientific adviser, has been telling
the British government(2). It is the obvious if unspoken conclusion of
scores of scientific papers. Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research, for example, suggests that even global
cuts of 3% a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with four degrees of
warming by the end of the century(3,4). At the moment emissions are
heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate. If this
continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows?
Faced with such figures, I can't blame anyone for throwing up his hands.
But before you succumb to this fatalism, let me talk you through the
options.
Yes, it is true that mitigation has so far failed. Sabotaged by
Clinton(5), abandoned by Bush, attended half-heartedly by the other rich
nations, the global climate talks have so far been a total failure. The
targets they have set bear no relationship to the science and are negated
anyway by loopholes and false accounting. Nations like the UK which are
meeting their obligations under the Kyoto protocol have succeeded only by
outsourcing their pollution to other countries(6,7). Nations like Canada,
which are flouting their obligations, face no meaningful sanctions.
Lord Stern made it too easy: he appears to have underestimated the costs
of mitigation. As the professor of energy policy Dieter Helm has shown,
Stern's assumption that our consumption can continue to grow while our
emissions fall is implausible(8). To have any hope of making substantial
cuts we have both to reduce our consumption and transfer resources to
countries like China to pay for the switch to low-carbon technologies. As
Helm notes, "there is not much in the study of human nature�and indeed
human biology�to give support to the optimist."
But we cannot abandon mitigation unless we have a better option. We don't.
If you think our attempts to prevent emissions are futile, take a look at
our efforts to adapt.
Where Stern appears to be correct is in proposing that the costs of
stopping climate breakdown - great as they would be - are far lower than
the costs of living with it. Germany is spending E600m just on a new sea
wall for Hamburg(9) - and this money was committed before the news came
through that sea level rises this century could be two or three times as
great as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted(10).
The Netherlands will spend E2.2bn on dykes between now and 2015; again
they are likely to be inadequate. The UN suggests that the rich countries
should be transferring $50-75bn a year to the poor ones now to help them
cope with climate change, with a massive increase later on(11). But
nothing like this is happening.
A Guardian investigation reveals that the rich nations have promised $18bn
to help the poor nations adapt to climate change over the past seven
years, but they have disbursed only 5% of that money(12). Much of it has
been transferred from foreign aid budgets anyway: a net gain for the poor
of nothing(13). Oxfam has made a compelling case for how adaptation should
be funded: nations should pay according to the amount of carbon they
produce per capita, coupled with their position on the human development
index(14). On this basis, the US should supply over 40% of the money and
the European Union over 30%, with Japan, Canada, Australia and Korea
making up the balance. But what are the chances of getting them to cough
up?
There's a limit to what this money could buy anyway. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change says that "global mean temperature changes greater
than 4�C above 1990-2000 levels" would "exceed � the adaptive capacity of
many systems."(15) At this point there's nothing you can do, for example,
to prevent the loss of ecosystems, the melting of glaciers and the
disintegration of major ice sheets. Elsewhere it spells out the
consequences more starkly: global food production, it says, is "very
likely to decrease above about 3�C"(16). Buy your way out of that.
And it doesn't stop there. The IPCC also finds that, above three degrees
of warming, the world's vegetation will become "a net source of
carbon"(17). This is just one of the climate feedbacks triggered by a high
level of warming. Four degrees might take us inexorably to five or six:
the end - for humans - of just about everything.
Until recently, scientists spoke of carbon concentrations - and
temperatures - peaking and then falling back. But a recent paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that "climate change
� is largely irreversible for 1,000 years after emissions stop."(18) Even
if we were to cut carbon emissions to zero today, by the year 3000 our
contribution to atmospheric concentrations would decline by just 40%. High
temperatures would remain more or less constant until then. If we produce
it we're stuck with it.
In the rich nations we will muddle through, for a few generations, and
spend nearly everything we have on coping. But where the money is needed
most there will be nothing. The ecological debt the rich world owes to the
poor will never be discharged, just as it has never accepted that it
should offer reparations for the slave trade and for the pillage of gold,
silver, rubber, sugar and all the other commodities taken without due
payment from its colonies. Finding the political will for crash cuts in
carbon production is improbable. But finding the political will - when the
disasters have already begun - to spend adaptation money on poor nations
rather than on ourselves will be impossible.
The world won't adapt and can't adapt: the only adaptive response to a
global shortage of food is starvation. Of the two strategies it is
mitigation, not adaptation, which turns out to be the most feasible
option, even if this stretches the concept of feasibility to the limits.
As Dieter Helm points out, the action required today is unlikely but "not
impossible. It is a matter ultimately of human well being and ethics."(19)
Yes, it might already be too late - even if we reduced emissions to zero
tomorrow - to prevent more than two degrees of warming, but we cannot
behave as if it is, for in doing so we make the prediction come true.
Tough as this fight may be, improbable as success might seem, we cannot
afford to surrender.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Eg David Adam, 13th March 2009. Stern attacks politicians over climate
�devastation'. The Guardian.
2. James Randerson, 7th August 2008. Climate change: Prepare for global
temperature rise of 4C, warns top scientist. The Guardian.
3. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, 2008. Reframing the climate change
challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society A. Published online.
doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/journal_papers/fulltext.pdf
4. They are referring to stabilisation at 650 parts per million CO2
equivalent. The IPCC suggests that this would produce something the region
of 4C, even before all the likely feedbacks have b een taken into account.
See Table SPM6 of the IPCC's Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report -
Summary for Policymakers.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
5. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/17/hurray-were-going-backwards/
6. http://www.sei.se/index.php?page=newsitem&item=5720
7. http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/publications/Carbon_record_2007.pdf
8. Dieter Helm, 21st February 2009. Environmental challenges in a warming
world: consumption, costs and responsibilities. Tanner Lecture, Oxford.
http://www.dieterhelm.co.uk/publications/TANNER%20LECTURE%20Feb09.pdf
9. Oxfam, 29th May 2007. Adapting to climate change. Briefing Paper 104.
http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/climate_change/downloads/bp104_adap
ting_to_climate_change.pdf
10.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/11/sea-level-rises-climate-ch
ange-copenhagen
11. John Vidal, 20th February 2009. Rich nations failing to meet climate
aid pledges. The Guardian.
12. ibid.
13. Oxfam, 29th May 2007, ibid.
14. Oxfam, 29th May 2007, ibid.
15. IPCC, 2007b. Assessing key vulnerabilities and the risk from climate
change.
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter19.pdf
16. ibid, Table 19.1.
17. IPCC, 2007b, ibid.
18. Susan Solomona,1, Gian-Kasper Plattnerb, Reto Knuttic, and Pierre
Friedlingstein, 16th December 2008. Irreversible climate change due to
carbon dioxide emissions.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/01/28/0812721106.full.pdf+html
19. Dieter Helm, 21st February 2009, ibid.
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!DSPAM:2676,49d0ab5925631265863436!
kroneckerdelta blues
played on an, as yet, unidentified instrument - 5-strings, similar to
a sarod, with a metal finger-board, no frets, and a skin head over a
wooden-bowl body. but there are no sympathetic strings, the appearance
is something like a seni-rabab (which has gut strings and a wooden
finger-board. the original bridge was extremely high, indicating it
might be bowed, but it's not rebab-shaped, and that would be difficult.
the other possibility is that it was fingered only near the nut; it
seems to go out of tune otherwise. so i whittled down a chinese bamboo
bridge, which i shimmed up; this works a bit better, but only a bit.
i found it less difficult to play fretless than i thought it would be;
on the other hand, the strings are close together and that makes for a
somewhat ragged style. i use nails, sometimes with a sitar pick as
well. because of the humidity, the skin is somewhat slack, and the
sound is an odd combination of incredible resonance and 'thump.' i
tuned the five strings c-g-f-c'c' - the last two double-coursed like a
saz. the first five pieces use the instrument; the last uses the cura
cumbus, which is fretted. the overall impression is manic and strange
and hopefully of interest. (the kronecker delta is a 0/1 operator in
quantum mechanics.)
http://www.alansondheim.org/kroneckerdelta1.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/kroneckerdelta2.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/kroneckerdelta3.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/kroneckerdelta4.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/kroneckerdelta5.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/kroneckerdelta6.mp3
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:31:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: Center for Biological Diversity <kieran@biologicaldiversity.org>
To: sondheim@panix.com
Subject: Breaking News: Investigators Say Jaguar Death Was Unnecessary
Breaking News: Investigators Say Jaguar Death Was Unnecessary
Dear Alan,
Two weeks ago the last known American jaguar died. Not in the wild. Not by mistake. He was euthanized on a stainless-steel table in Phoenix.
When the state-sanctioned vet said it was better for Macho B to die this way than in the wilderness, where he had lived for 15 years, I was taken aback. When the vet said Macho B could have lived another two months, I wondered: Why the rush to euthanize him? When the vet said Macho B's death was "necessary" due to long-term kidney failure, I called for an independent investigation.
The story just didn't add up.
The first of the independent investigations is complete, but state and federal wildlife agencies won't release it. The Arizona Daily Star, however, talked to the investigators and confirmed my worst fears.
Tissue samples show no sign of kidney failure. Indeed, University of Arizona pathologist Sharon Dial stated that, "For a supposed 15-year-old cat, he had damned good-looking kidneys."
The euthanization was rushed and unnecessary. Macho B was likely suffering from severe dehydration, probably brought on by his snaring, anesthetizing, and collaring. Rather than being killed, said Dial, Macho B should have been given intravenous fluids for 24 to 48 hours. There was just not enough information to support euthanizing him so quickly.
Macho B was injured, possibly fatally, during capture. Though the wildlife agencies publicly denied Macho B's death was caused by "capture myopathy" (i.e. stress and injury), internal memos stated: "Department personnel suspected capture myopathy/renal failure." Only after the Star's investigation was it revealed that Macho B's paw was severely swollen, and deep scratch marks were found seven feet up the tree where he was snared.
The necropsy was botched. Investigations into the cause of death have been hampered by a decision to do a "cosmetic" rather than a full necropsy so that Macho B's pelt could be stuffed for "educational" presentations. Why and who deemed this more important than a full investigation?
The only good news to report is that the Center for Biological Diversity's lawsuit to establish a federal recovery plan and protected critical habitat for the jaguar is going well. In a hearing last Monday, the federal judge peppered the government's lawyer with skeptical questions, showing his discomfort with how the agency has continually changed its rationale for not protecting America's jaguars.
Establishment of a federal recovery plan would likely have prevented the death of Macho B, and it certainly would have prevented what one pathologist called a "lack of total transparency" in how the post-capture handling has been conducted.
I'll let you know as soon as new developments arise. Meanwhile, if you haven't already done so, please donate to the Center's Jaguar Legal Defense Fund today: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2167/t/5243/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4720. We're over halfway to our goal of raising $40,000. Winning this case - just as we won two crucial cases forcing recovery of the endangered Mexican wolf - is critical to the restoration of jaguars to the United States.
Kieran Suckling
Executive Director
Center for Biological Diversity
P.S. The Center is continuing to investigate how Macho B came to be captured in the first place. It is illegal to purposefully trap jaguars, and yet, bizarrely, bear and mountain lion traps were set in the canyon where Macho B was known to be prowling. Donate now to make sure Macho B's death is fully investigated and future jaguars are protected: https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/2167/t/5243/shop/custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=4720.
P.P.S. Read the full Arizona Daily Star Article here: http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/center/articles/2009/arizona-daily-star-03-29-2009.html.
******************************************
This message was sent to sondheim@panix.com.
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