The Moriyama RAIC International Prize

Raymond Moriyama and the RAIC have created a new prize for architecture - $100K awarded every two years for buildings that "reflect the values that are so important to Raymond: humanism, equality, and inclusivity." You can read more about it here.

I can appreciate why Moriyama and the RAIC think this will raise the profile of Canadian architecture (presuming a Canadian wins at some point) but it remains to be seen whether or not it is a good idea. Moriyama is of a very particular era, speaking only of his work as an architect. After WWII people genuinely believed architecture could play a significant role in social change and they were right. The war had destroyed whole cities in Europe and Asia and there was a tremendous "peace dividend" in North America, where everyone "knew" real estate was the only truly safe investment. Architects had the opportunity not only to employ new technologies on a large scale for the first time but they could also step in a create entire cities from scratch. The entire world was being rebuilt and architects had enormous social power.

Our circumstances have changed. Not even architects believe architecture is as powerful now as it was 50 years ago. What this award is likely to do is bring international attention to one very good building every two years and, while that isn't bad it doesn't really qualify as good either. I talked about this before in my spiel on niceness in architecture but award winning buildings are important to only a tiny minority of people. Architects themselves, architecture students, people who write about design. Hard to think of anyone else. The important buildings are different for everyone and about the only thing they have in common is no one pays any attention to them. And you can be absolutely certain no one wins $100K for them.

This award will be meaningful or not depending on who wins and why. It is a near certainty that none of the winners will actually need $100K. In that sense it is kind of stupid but I guess if it was only $20 the media would pay even less attention to it than they will now. If this award goes to the kind of building I think it is going to go to (the best example of the work of one of maybe ten or fifteen firms world-wide) then it will be meaningless. Or at least as bad as the Pritzker. It would be a different thing entirely to give $100K to a firm that was just starting out and could use the money. Or to split it into 10 prizes in different categories. Or to award it retrospectively to buildings that are not less than, say, ten years old. It's very difficult to tell how well a building will age and, given that this award is about quality in construction and "not a beauty contest", it seems like waiting to see if how the building ages might be a good idea. It would be embarrassing as hell to give the award to a building that fell apart six months later.

Having chosen the Aga Khan Museum as the site of the award ceremony does give me a tiny bit of hope the prize will be something more than an architects-only circle-jerk. The Aga Khan awards are about the only genuinely interesting architecture contest going. The jury consistently finds work that provides the architects of the world with bucketloads of details to steal (and is even more valuable for the world's architecture students). The work recognized by the Aga Khan is typically cheap, interesting, and innovative as hell. Part of that is because they recognize so many buildings. One building every two years just doesn't seem like enough. Another point in favour of the Aga Khan's is the buildings are from parts of the world The Architecture Record and Architecture Review don't visit very often. We'll see. If this turns into another occasion to celebrate the same office everyone else is celebrating that year, Moriyama wasted his money. If one of my friends wins, it will instantly become the best award since Alfred Nobel started blowing shit up.          

On Building Codes

NOTE: the absolute necessity of changing the way we design and build most new buildings is obvious to me and the current way building design is controlled by the government's concerned is through various Building Codes. So they will have to be changed. The basic concept behind those changes is equally obvious - both construction and operation of all buildings must consume less energy. As for how that might be achieved, I'm spit-balling here.


Sometime soon, probably in the next ten years, every Building Code in North America will have to be completely re-written. There are two simple reasons for this; one is very simple, the other slightly more complicated.

The first reason is energy consumption. Architecture is very energy intensive. We have been designing buildings for the last 60 or 70 years that are predicated on a circumstance that no longer applies, and hasn't applied in a long time. Concrete and glass buildings made sense when it was cheaper to heat and cool a building than insulate it. This was because we didn't calculate the true cost of heating buildings, just the user cost. Now we know the true cost is much higher - and possibly unimaginable. So building codes will become more prescriptive by necessity. If you are involved in either the building industry or the environmental movement that will be kind of self-evident.

The dominant type of large building in every city, big and small, in North America changed decisively because of the invention of air conditioning. Prior to air conditioning buildings were designed with thick skins and relatively small amounts of glazing - a delicate balance between dark interiors are stifling hot spaces. After air conditioning that balancing act was no longer necessary. Buildings were turned into giant windows with enormous cooling loads. There is almost no subjective difference between a building with relatively small windows and one with floor to ceiling glazing. The only time it really matters is the first time someone walks into the space and gets a chance to say, "I love the view." Then they hang shades over all the glazing to prevent the glare from blinding everyone. But the cooling load isn't changed by the shades.

So one very simple way to make buildings many times more energy efficient than they are currently is to start designing them like architects did in the 1930s. More articulated plans (the "T" and "H" plans being very effective), thicker walls off materials like stone and brick, and much smaller windows (preferably operable).

The second reason is the current structure or ideology of building codes. Pretty much every building code in the world is based on the lowest allowable standard. When people talk about something being "not up to code" it can sound like a bureaucratic complaint. Really, it's a pretty stunning indictment since the code defines the absolute lowest quality a building can be and still be legal. There are a lot of auxiliary guides (recommended practices and so on) that set a higher standard but they are strictly optional from a legal perspective. A client can demand a building that conforms to best practices but the legal authorities can only demand code compliance. This makes sense in a stupid kind of way. The law defines only what is legal and illegal. It does not define proper and improper or even good and bad. So less than the given standard is illegal but the standard is not necessarily typical or desirable.

Building codes have to address buildings as complete wholes and not address the isolated components within them. For instance, it isn't enough to specify the minimum R-value for a wall assembly and a roof assembly and so on. The total energy consumption of the entire building should be calculated in life-cycle cost and regulated based on a combination of volume, life span, and program. The problem with making this kind of measurement the basis of a legal code is no one has, to the best of my knowledge, created an acceptable measure for life-cycle costing. It is a measure that is surprisingly tricky. Take aluminum. It requires a massive amount of energy to get aluminum from the ground into a building but, once that energy has been spent, it requires surprisingly little energy to recycle the stuff. Steel is much cheaper (in terms of energy) to get from the ground to the building site but recycling it is surprisingly inefficient - the only net change is the energy spent getting it out of the ground.

I can imagine a set of codes devoted to energy budgeting. A certain type of building of a certain size is allowed a maximum amount of energy - one number for construction and another for yearly consumption. If you want to use more than that, you have to generate your own. It's not really difficult to make a building that generates its own power - we had many different ways of doing it prior to the invention of the electric turbine and we have even more now. You can choose the relatively simple (sticking solar panels on the roof) or the fairly expensive (like ground source heating and cooling) or relatively complex (check out this building by Baumschlager and Eberle) The point, to me, is we know how to make these. It isn't rocket science. It is a set of components and procedures that requires nothing more than a small additional expense during the design and construction phases and which, if we built every building as efficient as this example, would have an enormous effect on our net energy use.

Of course that energy would just be used some place else and the planet is still going to overheat on schedule and force the human race into a condition not unlike that portrayed in The Road Warrior or The Walking Dead. Shit, did I type that? I was trying to be constructive for once and write something that was only moderately bitchy but it just kind of slipped out.

Nothing for a long time

I've been away, attending to things that require more than 15 minutes of thinking and typing. I have been keeping up with my climate science reading list and things are just getting worse - as predicted. But in the time I've been away from this thing (whatever it is) I've been having a lot more flesh and blood interaction. It has become devastatingly clear having some idea of the true state of climate science makes me a less than ideal conversationalist.

I remember the first Gulf War - Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm. And among the things I remember is how the US used the (frankly insane) speeches Saddam Hussein started giving after the USAF started bombing his country back into the stone age as a pretext for the bombings themselves. Hussein started raving about rivers of blood and a carnage that would be remembered for a thousand years and so on. Commentators in the States began crowing, "We told you this guy was a maniac!!!" And a lot of people were swayed by that. It is worth remembering the first Gulf War was very unpopular until it was won (with some very cool pyrotechnic displays brought to us live by CNN). George Bush not the Lesser needed all the PR pushes he could get in the early days of the conflict and Hussein seemed to be playing along - acting the part of the comic book villain at just the right moment (right before American and coalition troops were to start the ground offensive.

For a lot of people Hussein's posturing seemed incomprehensible. His country was being destroyed. His military was hopelessly outmatched by the US. More precisely by the USAF. Every military in the world is hopelessly outclassed by the USAF. Gwynne Dyer put in perspective for me. He said, "Once you have the United States Air Force on your case, all the rest is details." Hussein could act penitent or insane or he could dance a jig and it wasn't going to change a thing. The USAF was going to destroy his armed forces ability to resist and then it was going to destroy everything else.

That's kind of how I feel right now. Once you have fucked the planet's climate so badly it will no longer support human life, everything else is details. There is no correct behaviour for this situation because nothing we do at this point is going to make a lick of difference. Chief climate apocalyptic Guy McPherson is trying to change our behaviour because he believes there is a chance that really radical changes might be able to preserve other species. I think he is fooling himself. When the wheels come off humans will not go gentle into that good night. We will take everything we can with us. We will eat everything that can be eaten, burn everything that burns, destroy for the sake of destruction. That is if history is anything to judge by.

All of which has reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut's prophetic Cat's Cradle. The shortest Book of Bokonon is called (and I'm paraphrasing) "What Can a Reasonable Person Expect for the Future of the Human Race Given Three Thousand Years of History as a Guide" and the complete text of the chapter (and this is a direct quote) is: nothing.

The NDP should listen to me more

For those of you watching Canadian politics (an even smaller audience than those who care about my environmental dooms-day-ism) Thomas Mulcair finally made the national news. How? By doing what I told him to do. Specifically, by attacking new finance minister Joe Oliver for his record on the environment. Mulcair said Oliver is, "an embarrassment and that he should be named minster of finance for Canada is a real shame." Then Mulcair called Oliver a racist.

While Oliver was minister of oil he attacked climate science with the vitriol and dishonesty that characterizes the best of Canadian politics (American style). In his zeal to sell bitumen to whoever was buying he attacked Al Gore, whose claims he described as "wildly exaggerated", and James Hansen, whose predictions re environmental costs of the Keystone Pipeline he called "frankly nonsense".

So, Mr. Mulcair, if you read this you have to be prepared for the overblown, contemptuous, histrionic reaction of the Harper government. They will say you are unstatesmanlike. They will say you should be ashamed. They have already called on you to apologize. Take a lesson from the Right. When they say contemptible and idiotic things and are called upon to retract them, they never do. They double down. What you said was nothing more than the simple truth. Oliver was paternalistic and racist as a minister of the federal government. His shilling for the petrochemical industry is disgraceful. Many many people wonder if he even believes in anthropogenic climate change. Don't back down, double down. Attack him again. And again. And again.

When you hit him, you hit Harper. So keep swinging. Hit everywhere and every way you can. That this attack was launched against a minister who has publicly announced the Harper government's position on the environment makes it so much sweeter.  

George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language"

I admire the hell out of good essay writers. Orwell is one of my favourites. I've written before that the first time I read an anthology of his essays I was depressed for weeks because he wrote over and over about how WWII would force England into a kind of "Capitalism with English values" - a form of Socialism with the State controlling all means of production. And in that he was very obviously wrong. Reading his essays again, I'm more struck by the breadth of his topics than his politics. He published on the cost of reading books, the mating cycle of common toads, boys magazines, good bad books, other writers, the Americanisation of England, English public schools, and cet. His most common topics, politics and writing, come together in the fabulous and famous (tho not famous enough) essay Politics and the English Language.

In it Orwell contrasts the common uses of language and its political uses. It is commonly used for communication but its political use is to obscure, mislead, and generally lie. Near the end of the essay he gives six simple rules every writer should follow:

1) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2) Never use a long word when a short one will do.
3) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4) Never use the passive [voice] where you can use the active.
5) Never use a foreign phrase, scientific word, or a jargon word if you can use an everyday English equivalent.
6) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Orwell's main theme in Politics is canned metaphors and stock phrases exclude proper thought. It is not only the reader who is lost; the habit of misusing language eventually leads to sloppy thinking. Orwell challenges his readers to use language correctly and creatively.

The reason I am so fond of this essay, aside from my semi-professional interest in language, is the implications it has on architecture. I should follow Orwell's example and grab a sample of archi-speak to critique. Problematically, the architecture community in Canada is very small so the probability I would know the author is quite high. Let me see if I can grab something international. This is from Architizer's A+ Awards:

Each wing has its own qualities, different from each other and yet seamlessly connected to the next. In this way the building acts as an embodiment of the journey of education, with less distinction of any prescribed boundaries between disciplines. The colour strategy reinforces the identity of the academic disciplines, universally enhanced by the richness of natural materials, such as locally recycled timber. Planning allows the building’s circulation to constantly return to the library at its heart, and in this way is physically and experientially in parallel with the educational ethos of the school.  

You want to take a shot at what that really means? I don't. I think I could puzzle some kind of meaning out of it but whether or not what I came up with was what the author intended, I have no idea. The more I read it, the more inconclusive it becomes. 

This kind of writing is typical of architecture. The problem, very generally, is architects are trained to think visually and spatially. There is a vocabulary that has been invented, borrowed, or stolen from other disciplines to allow architects to write and talk about what they do but it is difficult to use with precision. So words that have specific and important meanings get tossed around until they become as meaningless as "fascism" is today. As an interesting experiment, try substituting "oogeyboogeymanism" for "fascism" in anything you find on the internet and you will notice how infrequently the meaning of the sentence changes. 

Architecture is difficult to write about at the best of times. When the meaning of the words we use for the most fundamental concepts are debased by misuse it becomes impossible. 

How the NDP can (maybe) win the next election

Way back in the 1940s George Orwell wrote about the debilitating effects of being a permanent and pensioned opposition. The problem, as he saw it, was relegating yourself to the role of the perpetual critic means an inevitable decline in the quality of your ideas. It is far easier to just attack everything the government does than propose meaningful changes that reflect how things ought to be done. One could argue this is more true for the parties opposing the Harper government than it has been for any other opposition. Everything Harper's government has done is so readily available for attack it would make the most rigorous thinker a little sloppy. How hard is it to land punches on the guy who targets librarians as potential political enemies?

In my adult life the NDP has had two great leaders. One is of course Jack Layton. The other was Ed Broadbent. Old Ed never came close to winning an election and, in a way, that was the source of his greatness. It never seemed like he tried to win elections. To do that, you have to do the things Jack Layton was willing to do. You have to move away from organized labour. You have to appeal more to the middle class. You have to think in terms of power politics and vote scrounging and back room dealing. No one thinks winning elections is as noble as they made it seem on The West Wing. There is no one left who still believes politics is about an honourable presentation of different priorities or even conflicting ideologies. It is about winning.

The next federal election is going to come down to whether or not the Liberals can take Quebec back from the NDP. There is going to be a lot of talk about strategic voting in Quebec. "If Quebec goes to the NDP again we will be stuck with another Harper government." That is what the Liberals will argue and it is difficult at this point to argue with them. Harper is untouchable on the prairie. He will do well in Ontario but even without looking at any numbers, it is easy enough to predict a strong Liberal showing here. Harper will control Ontario the same way he did in the last election - picking out the 'must have' ridings and visiting all of them more than once. He will get the ridings he wants because of the make up of the constituency. These are the people in Toronto who voted for Ford and would again. They are small government, low tax ideologues. The polar opposite of people like me. They don't care about the systematic destruction of libraries or research stations. They don't care about environmental regulation. They don't care about very much at all except what this government is going to cost them and there is simply no way any party can beat the Conservatives in that game.

I don't know what will happen in BC or in the maritimes and I don't really care. It isn't important. The election will be decided by who takes Quebec. Ontario (Liberal) and the Prairie provinces (Conservative) will cancel each other out and the Conservatives will win unless the Liberals take Quebec. That is the situation everyone is planning for and it's a huge mistake for Mulcair to let it play that way. Yes, he has an opportunity to actually gain power while losing seats provided the Libs win enough of them to form a minority. But that is a bad bet.

What Mulcair needs is a new consensus. I think the NDP have made a calculation that the youth vote, such as it is, will go to Trudeau. And if Mulcair keeps on as he is going, it will. At least in Ontario. But these are not the same youth as those who voted for Trudeau Sr. These are the kids who were Occupiers. Who were part of the pots and pans revolution in Quebec. There is a consensus out there waiting and no one is trying to get it.

To win Mulcair needs a coalition of the young, the green, and the poor (and scared). He needs to frame the terms of the debate by constantly being the loudest and by hitting his issues every time he sees a microphone. Even when there isn't a microphone he should still be yelling about them because you never know what will wind up on Youtube. The problem he has now (other than a depressing lack of personality) is he has no issues!

To win Mulcair needs to make a commitment to freeze tuition and make a substantial reduction in student debt. He should promise to reduce tuition by 30% over the next four years. He should promise to forgive all student debt above $30K and cut the interest rate on all student debt to prime. Both the Cons and Libs are available to attacks on this front. And this doesn't just win young votes, it wins the votes of parents who are wondering how the hell they are going to put two kids through university.

To win Mulcair should scream about everything Harper has done to scientists and librarians during his government. He should make the immediate repeal of those laws his first act. He should form a parliamentary commission on climate change to make the current data available to MPs and every Canadian and he should promise to fund climate science particularly in the Arctic. He should also promise to kill the Keystone Pipeline. I don't know how he feels about making promises he can't keep but he should attack the Keystone Pipeline at every opportunity. This would be both good governance and good politics. The Americans can make it happen if they really want to but our government should make it as hard for them as possible. The Cons record on environmental issues is so miserable this is really a no brainer. This should be a constant source of misery for Harper. Mulcair can force Harper to take a position that will cost him seats in both Quebec and Ontario to protect his core in the prairies. Even if the strategy is to go for a minority with the Libs, these should be core issues for Mulcair.

Mulcair should promise a complete overhaul of our tax system and the creation of two more income tax tiers. The system should be redesigned to move the onus from low and middle income families and place it on corporations and the people who run them. Mulcair can make this attack because multimillionaires don't donate to the NDP anyway. And this is the kind of move that will free those in the middle class who vote their wallets but would like to vote their conscience to do so.

The last thing Mulcair has to promise is transparency in government. This means subpoena power for parliamentary budget oversight. Everyone else has lied to Canadians about a transparent government, now it't the NDPs turn. The ugly fact is the NDP are the only party who can promise this without being faced with their previous broken promises.

This is a coalition that can gain seats for Mulcair. He can keep what Layton won in Quebec and build in the other provinces. But he has to become more forceful to do so. He needs to be on the attack all the time. Every time he is near Harper he should hit him on the environment and on the structure of the tax system. Every time he is near Trudeau he should hit him with a lack of ambition - all style and no substance. He should be pounding taxes, tuition, transparency and the environment but he won't. I wish I could find a synonym for environment that started with a 't' but I can't. Actually it works better if you communicate the concern for the environment as support for science and scientists. People still, stupidly, argue about the environment but most Canadians are offended by an American style attack on science.

Mulcair should support these issues because they are right. I have made no secret about my support for them and my distaste for those who attack them. But more importantly, he has to fight for something. Canadians like to think we are the friendly nation but the truth, if you look at our electoral record, doesn't support this. We like fighters. We loved Trudeau and he declared martial law. We loved Chretien (who was best described as "looking like the guy who drives the get-away car" and was manifestly crooked). We loved Harper and that pains me to say but the guy has been in total control over his party forever and the nation for far too long. We love fighters. It's what we loved about Jack Layton. He took Quebec on two things: sympathy for his illness and the fact he took absolutely no shit from anyone in the debates. Mulcair needs to get dirty. He needs to become a scrapper. I don't think Trudeau will. He will put up just enough of a fight to make it clear he has no patience with Harper but, on the whole, his strategy will be charm and the occasional bon mot.

Frankly, I think the deal is already done. I think the best the NDP are betting they can do is prevent Trudeau from forming a majority and that's a scary thought because we don't know how Trudeau will stand up as a party leader in a national election. We know Harper will be a machine in a sweater. With a plan. And money. Trudeau remains an unknown. Given the performance of the last three Libs to hold the top seat, I think it would be a huge mistake to bank on them doing anything. And if the NDP throws and Harper wins another government, I'm not only never voting NDP again - I'm leaving the country.

On the NDP's National Day of Action

After the last federal budget the NDP's Thomas Mulcair announced a National Day of Action. This is the kind of thing that gets my lefty heart pounding. Finally, citizens getting a chance to talk about substantive changes not just to the budget but to the whole idea of what government means to Canadians - what we are willing to pay and what we expect for that money. I was imagining a Nation wide debate, held at the local level but simultaneously with engaged and interested citizens mooting their own ideas and discussing issues that matter most to us. Instead, Mulcair decided the issues under discussion - and I'm not making this up - would be 1) ATM fees, 2) Credit Card interest rates, 3) Payday lending schemes, 4) corporate collusion and gas price fixing, and 5) companies adding a surcharge for mailing out statements at the end of each month.

Holy shit. It's lucky no one was killed in the resulting complete lack of interest. Why did they bother to stage a media event when they could have just stopped in to any Tim Horton's in the country and heard the exact same bitching? And got the exact same result. Nothing.

My five topics for a genuine National Day of Action? 1) Reducing income inequality to pre-1970 levels, 2) implementing a meaningful carbon tax for polluters, 3) the text of the apology to be delivered to scientists and librarians employed by the federal government as well as a repeal of all the insulting legislation the Harper government passed to curb their freedom of speech, 4) the creation of a new top tax bracket for incomes over $300k per annum and the elimination of a two decades worth of corporate tax breaks, and 5) giving subpoena powers to the parliamentary budget office.

and 6) reopening the Experimental Lakes Area with full funding. And one more for good luck 7) a federal commission on climate change run by climate scientists and funded by the federal government to provide the most up to date info to any member of parliament (to remain in effect until the climate stops changing or the world ends, whichever happens first).

Seriously, if I was a member of the NDP I would be very pissed off about this. What Mulcair is doing is taking the nation's pulse on issues that, by selection, belong to the conservatives. People who really think those are issues of importance are always going to vote for the conservatives because they are small issues that amount to, at most, a couple hundred bucks per year. And the conservatives will save them more than that by cutting taxes and services. Sure, those costs disproportionally hurt poor people but they are hurt far more by a government that keeps reducing its influence and ambition for the sake of reduced taxes.

People who support the NDP support big government - or, at least they are willing to provided the government has big ideas. The genuinely weird thing about Canadian politics, seen through the lens of American politics, is we are willing to pay more to get more. Canadians don't share the American fanaticism about small government. Most Canadians want a bigger government if you ask them on an issue by issue basis. When the sum of these issues is a government that takes a large and active role in our national life, people are not just willing to accept it - they welcome it. In 2004, the CBC started a contest to choose the "most influential Canadian". Most people thought it would go to Wayne Gretzky or Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester Pearson but it went to the Prairie Giant, Tommy Douglas. The father of socialized medicine in Canada. If the NDP wants to gain seats, if it wants to hold on to the ones it has, Thomas Mulcair better start thinking bigger.  

Nice work if you can get it.

This is a piece about how climate change denial is being funded by the same people who brought us the Harper Government. Every time I see something like this my first thought is, "That's disgusting" and my second is, "I could do that".

For the record, the IPCC (a tremendously conservative body) included in its conclusions that climate scientists are 95% certain climate change is both real and anthropogenic. Of the scientists who contributed to it, 97.1% agreed its anthropogenic. Here's a take on those numbers in the middle of a really good attack on the media for it's fair and equal presentation of ideas. Here is an interesting article on the lay deniers who argue winter is positive proof the anthropogenic argument is wrong and how that should replace, "Hot enough for you?" as the standard culture signifier for an annoying loudmouth.

Still, there seems to be a consensus there is very little we can do as individuals except try to find the best way to survive the coming changes. The people who we need to be at the head of the movement for change are the same people who are funding the attacks against the science demonstrating the need for change. The fight is fix, as Leonard Cohen told us a long time ago. Things are so bad here is Canada, the government sends chaperones to sit with Canadian scientists at press conferences to ensure they stay "on message".

Since you don't need an advanced degree in climate science to attack it and anyone who wants to take a crack at "debunking" climate science already has the winning combination of an audience who want to be convinced and backers with deep pockets I might be approaching this issue completely backwards. The way I see it, I have two separate but related problems. I need to make money. That's problem number one. It's not as important as problem number two but it is far more immediate. Problem two is, of course, the fact we might have already locked in a climate change that will make the Earth uninhabitable.

This piece was published almost two years ago and it's a really interesting take on the new world order and our reactions to it. After connecting the current crop of apocalypse fanboys (including me, I suppose) to the people who were reacting similarly to the Mayan prophecy of 2012 (which I didn't credit for a second) or Y2K (which I also completely ignored), the author throws the king-bastard of all bummers on the unsuspecting reader:

"Imagine a future in which all the trends I've just sketched out [increasingly frequent disasters and a less and less assistance from the government and the community] just keeps getting worse, a tunnel growing slowly darker without any light at the far end - not even the lamp of an oncoming train. More to the point, imagine that this is your future; that you, personally, will have to meet ever-increasing costs with an income that has less purchasing power each year; that you will spend each year you still have left as an employee hoping that it won't be your job's turn to go away forever, until that finally happens; that you will have to figure out how to cope as health care and dozens of other basic good and services stop being available at a price you can afford, or at any price at all; that you will spend the rest of your life in the conditions I've just sketched out, and you know as you die that the challenges waiting for your grandchildren will be quite a bit worse than the ones you faced."

I can't deny I have a strange fascination with this potential apocalypse I would have probably scorned two years ago. The extent I'm willing to believe the potential for global catastrophe seems directly correlated to the mess in my personal life. I don't know if that makes me as petty is it sounds. It probably does.

On Certainty

If you're a scientist or know anything about science you will probably want to stop reading this right now. I'm about to try to explain alpha errors and will almost certainly make a has of it.

Anyone who has been reading my latest entries will know I'm going a little crazy trying to figure out how much attention I should be paying to the scientific doomsdayers who say a + 4º planet is not fit for human inhabitation and would therefore result in Near Term Human Extinction. I was trying to talk to someone about it and, my first advice, don't do that. No one wants to hear about it. Literally no one. People have regular lives with a million little things built into them specifically so people can worry about sensible things and not craziness like human extinction. People worry about their kids, the schools their kids go to, the economy, their pensions, their next week at work, the state of their mortgages and other debts, many many normal things. They really don't need a lunatic like me dumping human extinction onto the pile and upsetting everything. Second thing, the concept of certainty requires explanation.

This is my best guess because I am not a scientist. I took some science as an undergrad but not much. Just enough to understand alpha and beta errors. So when scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, it means they know something is happening and they are 95% certain it means what they say it means. Or, if they are predicting, it means they are 95% certain about their model. There is a huge difference between measuring and predicting (obviously) but the more important question is, "How certain is 95% certain?"

That 95% is a very important number because by itself it tells us a lot about the state of climate science. It is the statistical representation of the probability of a false positive. That's what alpha error is, a false positive. Reporting something is happening when it isn't really. The kind of opposite of alpha error is beta error and that's a false negative - reporting nothing is happening when something really is. No one needs to worry about beta error at all so long as we are talking about climate change because everyone agrees something is happening.

Alpha is typically expressed as a decimal but it gets converted into a percentage for public consumption. When I was an undergrad, we were taught that in most cases an alpha of .2 was acceptable. Meaning the results are accurate 4 times out of 5 and the corresponding certainty was therefore 80%.  If you wanted a higher degree of certainty, you could make alpha .1 (or 9 times in ten, 90% certainty). So a 95% certainty is an accurate result 19 times in 20 or an alpha of .05

When you express it as a percentage it completely changes how people will perceive the number. 95% certain seems 5% more certain than 90%. And it is, kind of. But 1 error is 5 is twice as many errors (statistically) as 1 error in 10. And 1 in 10 is twice as many as 1 in 20. So 95% certain is not 15% more certain than 80% certain -it's four times as certain.  An alpha of .2 is four times as high as an alpha of .05 - and that's the alpha they are using.

So when climate scientists say they are 95% certain something is happening, they mean they absolutely and conclusively know something is happening but there is a 5% chance their results are occurring because of a selection bias.

I don't know how climate scientists deal with selection bias. When I was dealing with alpha and beta errors the biggest problems were geographical and historical - people in different parts of the world are different and that causes problems for generalizing results in the social sciences. But weather is always different in different places. It has to be. That's the definition of weather and it happens because we have an atmosphere (without which we would be even more completely fucked than I think we are).

I'm going to try to get an expert to explain this to me and I'll report back.

I guess I'm a descriptivist

In an essay about television David Foster Wallace (he of the long name and even longer books) described a professor, "He was the type of person who used which even when the correct pronoun was that because it sounds fancier." I'm paraphrasing. The essay is called E Unibas Pluram and it was published in A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again. You can look it up for yourself if you want.

So I googled "which that" (not really because of the Foster essay, which I do recommend, but because I had to look up mutatis mutandis) and found a dozen web pages dedicated to using grammar correctly. I think that might be redundant (grammar is by definition correct). It should probably go without saying but reading anything on not making a total clusterf*ck of the English language will convince you in about ten minutes that you can't use the language you have been speaking and writing your entire life and every time you open your mouth you make things worse.

Which vs that is kind of simple. I'm not going to explain it, you can google it yourself. But that got me looking at further vs farther and I felt like a champion. I was getting it right. Then I looked at the dreaded dangling participle. I didn't know English had participles. Who vs whom I mostly get right, dragged vs drug I didn't even know was a thing. Laid vs lie? No clue. There were about 200 "common grammatical mistakes" or "common grammar mistakes" I forget which (that?) one. And not only did I not know the answers, I didn't even know they were questions.

Correcting someone's grammar is about the most insulting thing you can do. It's a snide way of saying, "You're ignorant." But even worse, it's like telling someone, "You smile wrong." From that moment on they will be ashamed of smiling in case they forget the rules for how to do it.

There is, among people who work for dictionaries or have a startling amount of free time, a debate between the so-called Descriptivists and Prescriptivists. The D's think language should be studied as it is used and the rules continuously (continually?) changed to reflect usage. You can think of them as the people who want "ain't" to be in the dictionary. The P's want language to be used according to the rules. You can think of them as the people who know whether I meant continuously or continually two sentences ago. Or the people who complain it's "YLOO" not "YOLO". Prior to actually trying to figure out some of the rules that govern our language I would have said (written?) I was a P. I take language seriously even though I can't punctuate for shit. I read a lot of books and I know the difference between further and farther, lesser and fewer. But the more rules you learn, the more there are to learn. And, really, the more smug and irritating P's start to seem.

Even if I didn't care about associating myself with that annoying, know-it-all-ish, finger-wagging, prescriptivist bullshit, a big part of the greatness of the English language is its ability to consume and mangle. Some people think the reason has become the parole (langue?) of the world is because it is the language of business. I think that's only partly true. The official access to most languages is controlled by a bunch of tight-assed P's who say what is, and what isn't, a word. Which is why when you listen to people speaking other languages on the telephone, you hear, "[a bunch of Mandarin words] microwave [a bunch more Mandarin words]." The technical word for this is neologism and it just means you're allowed to make up words and pretend they're English any time you want. And anybody can do it. I think it's kind of funny because neologism is from the French neoligisme. They didn't have a word to describe new words so they took the Greek for "new" and the Greek for "word" and stuck them together. But in French it kind of means "a bullshit word" because you can't make neoligisme in French. You can in English, so neologism became a perfectly good English word to describe other new perfectly good English words.

There are way more than a million words in English. It's probably closer to two million by now. There are about 120 000 in German and only 90 000 in French. About 80 000 of those German words are used in English because the Germans have a real knack for coming up with words for saying crazy shit no one in English bothered trying to say until they found out the Germans already had a word for it. Like dopelgänger and schadenfreude. It's only fair to add that while you can't make new words in German you can stick two or more old words together to make a (kind of) new word. The English equivalent would be knowitallism (instead of the massively incorrect "know-it-all-ism"), which (that?) would then be mangled and changed to kiam or douchebaggery or something else no one could predict.

Even though I am willing to call myself a descriptivist, I'm still not going to admit a construction like, "Either you is or you is ain't..." There are degrees. I am a descriptivist to precisely the degree that my grammar is incorrect. Any mistakes I make should therefore not be construed as mistakes but, rather, as a fluid and lively use of a mutable and growing language. Other peoples mistakes are just wrong. Unless I make them too. What a wonderful fucking language.  

Pretending to care about the Olympics (again)

Today, if Facebook posts are a reliable indicator, the Canadian women's hockey team won a gold medal. Like anyone gives a fuck about women's hockey. I don't mean to offend any women that read this but it's hockey - a sport so fucking dumb you really should know better. I know that women are smarter than men. I'm not trying to dig myself out of a hole here, they really are. Guys are so dumb they are even dumb about the things they are smart about. Like boats or guns. A guy who owns a boat will think he knows every fucking thing there is to know about boats and all of it will be wrong. And it isn't women who are threatening to kill Obama if he takes their guns away. Really, that is typical of male thinking - you took my toys away so I'm going to hit you. We are dumber than five year olds. My nephew knows how to share, how many adult men do?

So hockey. That's a guy thing. And that's not me being macho. It's the most damning condemnation I can pass on a thing. It's so fucking stupid only guys like it. Women, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Curling, on the other hand, is something women also do. And they do it because you can't just throw the fucking rock as hard as your steroidal muscles will manage. It's physics, timing, delicacy, and a strange kind of tactical thinking women are better at than men. The only reason men beat women at curling is because they sweep better. Put a female skip and lead with two male sweepers against a male skip and lead and two female sweepers and the female skip will win every time. Men are only good for sweeping. Wow, our culture really dropped the ball on that stereotype.

I'm not bitching about the Olympics just because I like to piss on other peoples' parades. Although that's definitely part of it. I also bitched about George Bush the Lesser invading Iraq. That was stupid, disingenuous, and genocidal. The Olympics are stupid, disingenuous, and boring. So Iraq wins on the losing scale.

Before this Olympics started everyone was talking about boycotting it because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a crazed monster whose politics are somewhere to the right of Attila. But the homophobic part really rubbed people the wrong way. But, homophobic or not, it's been a long time since Canada won double gold in Olympic hockey (since Salt Lake). I guess we better hope the next winter Olympics doesn't coincide with any major political upheaval that requires some canny intervention from the Great White North - or failing that, that the men's team gets eliminated early.

To be fair, I never gave much thought to how to respond to the official homophobia of the Russian state. In some way I always think it's nice when a nation does something as dumb as actually codifying the prejudices and idiocies everyone knows they. It makes them so much easier to mock. Look at the famous case of Dred Scott. America was racist as fuck before that and racist as fuck after it but people still gave their heads a shake when they heard the Supreme Court let that cat out of the bag. So when Russia passed its ridiculous anti-gay propaganda law, I thought we were in for some quality humour and, maybe, some very entertaining arrests during the ice dancing competitions. But the hotels were shit and people started posting funny pictures on Instagram and that was the end of the anti-gay bashing.

Maybe we'll get lucky and those mad bastard Brazilians will make some nutty laws before 2016. I think I wrote this before but if they make pro-gay propaganda mandatory, I will watch the entire Olympiad. From the opening to closing ceremonies, I will watch every mind numbing long jumping pole vaulting minute.

Even more on public professors

I just wrote this in the previous entry but it was way at the bottom and I doubt anyone will bother struggling through my terrible prose to find it. So Nicholas Kristof published an op-ed piece on the need for more public intellectuals - something which I have previously agreed with. Kristof makes a glaring omission that I somehow didn't think of until my 15 minutes were almost up.

The most famous public intellectual (and the most trusted man in America according to some surveys) is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky. One of Chomsky's first big political splashes was his description of the limits of acceptable opinion. You can be a (very) little to the left on an issue or you can be (very) little to the right on it. But if you are outside the bounds of acceptable opinion, you might as well not say or write anything because no one will publish it. Of course, we have the interwebs now and you can publish it yourself on your blog or your Facebook page. And ten of your very best friends (who already agree with you) will read it. But if it gets too big and too many people read it, you will be excoriated in the journals that make public opinion as a radical. Maybe a radical liberal maybe a radical conservative but you will be described as a potentially dangerous lunatic either way.

So why do professors bury themselves in arcana? Partially because many fields of human knowledge are genuinely so fucking complex everything we don't already know seems like arcana to those of us who aren't specialists in the field. Anyone out there really understand anything beyond 12th grade particle physics? And partially because everything written above an 8th grade level seems like arcana to people who read newspapers. I happen to know a whole lot about the Roman concept of imperium, anyone interested? And partially because the spectrum of acceptable opinion is too fucking small for them to contribute anyway. I would really like to publish my opinions of American foreign policy since 1950, anyone want to print them for me?

More on Professors

Here is Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about how we need more professors to become public intellectuals. The article is a funny kind of thing because when I read it I got mad about it. And that's funny because I've made some very similar complaints here.

When I see it under someone else's name I can be a lot more critical. That's a ridiculous statements but the leader at the top of the page says, "Don't expect too much... 15 minutes or less." This is as smart as I can be on any given day in 10 to 15 minutes. And that's not very smart. So, let's start with the problems in Kristof's piece.

On the issue of academic marginalization: Kristof thinks (and I agree) the world needs more inspired generalists. This would be particularly true of the United States where Bill Nye (the Science Guy) has become the advocate for realism in the American culture. There is a systemic flaw (there are many but I want to write about one) in the academy and it has to do with the process of becoming a professor.

When you apply for a graduate school you have to submit a document stating your research intentions. And you know when you write it that the final result has to be a new and original contribution to the area you are working in. So. What are you going to do? Are you going to bet 4 years and +$100k that you can succeed in coming up with something new in an area that is very general and already has about a thousand books written about it or are you going to pick something very particular that no one else has researched yet? Kristof thinks you should do the latter but it's the riskier bet. And if you spend four years and pile up another $100-200k debt and don't come up with something you can use to get a job in academia, you're properly fucked. You know how long it takes to pay off $200k in student loans on what an adjunct prof makes? Forever. You'll be paying off loans with your social security - if there is any left by the time you apply for it. So the smart bet is specialization. And then you get a job (if you are very lucky) because you specialized. The next step is tenure and to earn that you have to publish and publish. Anything new can get published. It doesn't matter how arcane it is. Kristof acknowledges this in his backhand way. Publications in a newspaper don't count. Speeches made to thousands of people don't count (unless they are part of a conference). Being a dutiful and conscientious public intellectual doesn't count. Moving the conscience of a nation doesn't count. TED Talks really don't count (unless we are keeping track of the warm strokes to your ego). You need to teach and publish. So, if you do all that and you are very very lucky you get a tenured position. It is worth pointing out that since 1970 the number of tenured professors in the United States has increased only 10% despite hundreds of new schools opening and a massive increase in the percent of the population that goes to university or college. Luck is a very important factor.

Now you have another difficult decision to make. You feel very strongly about a number of issues and you want to bring your own knowledge to the discussion. Some of the administrators above you in the hierarchy (administrative positions have increased 240%) will be with you, some will be against you. Do you risk pissing people off - not just in the community at large but in the community you work in every single day? How many people do this outside of academia? What percentage stand up for their beliefs when it has the potential to cause them grief they can easily avoid by keeping their mouths shut? Academics have, I believe, a higher standard they ought to live up to but in order for them to do so we (meaning you, me, and everybody) have to make things just a little easier for them. I was looking for a site I sometimes visit that keeps track of the insane hoops academics are made to jump through, so I googled "professor complaint" and the first 5 pages of results were either instructions on how to complain about a professor or complaints against professors as a species. It is important to remember here that tenure isn't the last promotion a professor can get. There is a lot of money after that. Not just in salary either, the big money is in equipment, assistants, space to work, and other support.

Moving on. Kristof quotes a fellow at the Brookings Institute, "Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research." The Brookings Institute isn't a university, it's a think tank funded by ExxonMobil, the Carnegie Corporation, the Republic of China and Qatar (among others). As a think tank public advocacy is it's reason d'être. So long as it keeps up its advocacy for causes its donors support, it has no need to worry about money. Researchers at universities need a constant influx of money from private and corporate donors. The trend is away from corporate donations and toward corporate partnerships that give the corporations control over everything from the patents generated to curriculum and hiring. And we all know how much corporations love public advocacy. 

The liberal bias in the humanities and social science isn't a selection bias. There is no political agenda in the hiring committee. Same as there is no political agenda on the admission boards. The process of learning about any subject that falls into the humanities or social sciences has the effect of making a person more 'liberal'. That's using the American political spectrum. There are plenty of conservative professors in Canada in both faculties. In fact, I would argue historians are, by education, conservative. If history teaches you anything, it teaches you only very bad shit happens fast. Young people all want to change the world (or, if they are lazy, for the world to change itself). By the time they graduate they have learned every change in the world so far has produced an enormous body count and so they become conservative. Just not according to American nomenclature. So long as conservative means 'free market radical' they will be limited to economics. And maybe a few other disciplines that aren't particularly interested in how the world actually works.

In architecture, where I have the most direct experience, I would say my (tenured) professors were all far more conservative than I am. There were one or two Red Tories (conservatives with socialist leanings) but no Reds per se.

Kristof ends with a plea that professors not cloister themselves like medieval monks. And I agree with that too. But there is a reason medieval monks cloistered themselves. It was because the world they lived in became extremely hostile to them. And I think the same thing is true about professors. The world doesn't want to hear what they have to say. When the presidents and prime ministers of advanced nations start hurling anti-intellectual screed, when the government cracks down on "political speech" by librarians (as happened here in Canada, the political speech being discussions with kids in the third grade and helping people compile their family tree), when the mayor of Canada's largest city calls professors "leeches on the system" in a city council meeting, I would be cloistering myself too.

The worst part about the Kristof article is that he is right (in a very general way). I have argued here before that Matt Taibbi is the closest thing America has to a public intellectual (since George Carlin died). Maybe I should have given Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson more credit. The reason I was trying to find the site I mentioned about the lives of professors was because I read a very moving article I wish I could link written by a professor who just found out she has breast cancer. She had originally scheduled her scan for more than a year before the cancer was found but had to keep putting the appointment off for the everyday inconveniences being a professor entails. They don't have it easy, living off a kind of luxury welfare. The best professors I know, and in fact most of the professors I know, live their jobs. They don't ever really stop working. They become what they do and it is who they are. They have no private lives in the sense most people do. It's an incredible dedication to a vocation.

This entry is already a little long but, fuck, like I care whether any of this scrawl ever gets read by anyone. The second best lecture I ever attended in my life was about professions of the gown. There are, my professor said, some professions that require their practitioners to wear gowns. Judges, priests, professors, and sometimes lawyers. The reason they wear gowns is as a symbol of their collective purpose. Each judge is supposed to rule as any other judge would. Priests all perform the same sacrament in the same way. Professors share a common purpose and a common charge. The gown marks them as instruments of society. As a professor, and as a judge or priest, their duty is to society as a whole and not to some portion of it or to their own advancement. The gown is also a kind of visible submission to a more permanent order, a more lasting truth, than the world outside can offer. Judges are the voice of law, that abstract compact between people. The priest is the voice of an eternal g*d. The professor speaks only the truth as it is then known and is dedicated to making the current state of truth more faithful to reality. Of course some judges are corrupt, some priests pedophiles, some professors lazy and self-aggrandizing. The symbol of the gown finds its ultimate affirmation in the expulsion of priests, who are symbolically and literally defrocked.

This is perhaps the best argument against both Kristof and me. Public advocacy has little place in this culture of the gown. The role of professors is to relate the truth all the time to the best of their abilities. Public advocacy always reduces the conflicting ideas and simplifies them to a position that is right and a position that is wrong. There is no room for subtlety and, therefore, less fealty to the true state of things.

It is also worth pointing out that if there were thousands of professors making vigorous political stances on the issues of the day, how would we know? There is a limit to what the New York Times or the New Yorker (the publications Kristof takes as the bench mark for public advocacy) will print. If you are outside of those limits, you are left with few means of making your positions known. You can have a blog, I guess. You can speak at rallies that don't get covered in the news. You can organize talks in your local community center or church. Chomsky's main point about the potential from public advocacy is the how small the spectrum of acceptable opinion is. In the years since he first described it, it has only gotten smaller.

My fascination with the two Americas

Normally when someone writes about the split personality in the American psyche they are referring to the phenomenon Gwynne Dyer described by saying, "Half of the United States is very much like Canada; the other half is very like Iran." The simpler version is the distinction between the so-called Red and Blue States. I am starting the think of the two versions of America, the halves of its split personality as the idealistic version put forward in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the cynical version evidenced by its amoral calculation and power politics.

The first version might seem nothing more than a fantasy. Placed up against the other, harder, more opportunistic reality we see everyday it doesn't seem like much. Anyone trying to understand American policy (foreign and domestic) will struggle with making sense of any of it until they completely reject the idea of the United States as the "Champion of Democracy", the "Free World", and the last, best hope for reason. The "better angels of [their] nature" don't hold sway in the government very often or for very long. The purpose of the American government is to ensure the maximum benefit for those who govern (and those who get them elected). When Germany bailed out Greece as part of the sovereign debt crisis, no one was naive enough to think they were doing it out of altruism. They did it because they were afraid of the effect the collapse of Greek debt would have on German institutions. Yet, when America invaded Iraq they did it under the pretense of "bringing freedom to Iraqis". A ridiculous lie that the media repeated as an article of faith.

America's foreign adventures have always been predicated on (wholly and demonstrably false) claims of defending democracy, bringing liberty, and/or fighting communism. The CIA has, in the last half of the previous century, deposed or assassinated democratically elected leaders around the globe under the pathetic excuse of defending liberty and democracy. Someone looking solely at the historical record might justifiably wonder whether there is any basis for believing the more noble aspect of the American soul is anything other than a convenient alibi for doing thoroughly evil shit. As an interesting side note, the original plans for the invasion of Iraq was called "Operation Iraqi Liberty" until someone pointed out the unfortunately accurate acronym. The only reason one can speak of America as a bastion of democracy or liberty or freedom or anything other than naked power and barely concealed corruption is so many of the common people of America actually believe their ideals should be reflected in the things the government does in their name.

This strand of idealism never dominates and only infrequently mitigates American foreign policy. It certainly never helped Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Russia, Iraq, Afghanistan, or any of the other countries the United States has invaded, destabilized or forced into the Washington Consensus. But without it the power of the office of the President would be almost limitless. And Presidents are not famous for their discretion or charity in the use of that tremendous power.

I'm not a Constitutional scholar. I have to look up the Amendments if I want to remember what any of them after the 5th are about. I haven't studied the Constitutions of other countries. I know more about the governing of Republican Rome than I do about the European Union. But it seems kind of important to me the Constitution is largely dedicated to defining things the government can't do. The Amendments are almost exclusively dedicated to limiting governmental power. "Congress shall make no law..." Given the rate at which the Amendments are being decimated by the current (and some would argue permanent) state of emergency that gives the President extraordinary powers, some might argue the Constitution and Declaration of Independence are interesting documents with no relevance to anyone except historians. Certainly, the Supreme Court is making no effort to defend them. I wrote (but didn't publish) a list of recently enacted laws or revelations of law breaking in violation of the protections guaranteed to Americans but it got a little too long. People got exercised when the Patriot act allowed the CIA, NSA, and a host of new acronyms to violate 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 14th amendments rights but the "War of Terror" took priority - and the Patriot Act got renewed to the surprise of no one. The "War on Terror" followed the "War on Drugs" but preceded the "Mortgage Crisis" and the "Sovereign Debt Crisis". I think it's interesting the government's response to what it considers (or depicts as) wars is essentially the same as its response to economic crises.

Anyway, why do I think the "kinder gentler" America is anything other than a myth? Because everyone who serves in the military takes an oath to "defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic" and some of the people who take that oath take it fucking seriously. There is no organization with a greater moral authority to bring the American government to account than "Veterans for Peace". I'm not given to blind adulation of veterans. My grandfather and great-uncle were veterans of WWII and when my brother and I expressed an admiration for their heroism, they laughed in our faces. They said they weren't heroes, they were fools. And they resented the government for using their youthful ignorance against them. That pretty much shaped my opinion of every military everywhere. But I know of no more moving demonstration against the American invasion of Iraq than the veterans who lined up to throw the medals they had received in that war over the fence that surrounds the White House. They wanted to return them to the President directly. And one can imagine the change that would have created in American public opinion had it been allowed to happen. Unfortunately for the American people, and the American military most of all, the President's men were not foolish enough to let the veterans anywhere near the President.

There are millions of Americans who naively believe the lies their government tells them. There are millions more who don't but still believe America should be the nation its founders wanted it to be. They might be the best hope for those of us who are citizens of their Empire but without the rights and protections citizens receive. Of course, it's also possible my belief in the power of American idealism is a form of intellectual laziness. I think Edward Snowden might think that. For today I don't care. I need a little hope today.  

On James Lovelock

The climate scientist who was interviewed for the Guardian piece that was the subject of the previous post has apparently walked back his stated opinion that the human population will decrease by 80% by 2100. You can read about it here. Lovelock characterizes his earlier comments (in the Guardian) as 'alarmist'. I think 'absolutely fucking terrifying' would be more accurate. He then adds, "Nothing much is really happening."

How is one supposed to react to such a dramatic change of positions? He's gone from "only a few breeding pairs [of humans] will remain in the Arctic" to "the world has not really warmed up since the millennium." Is he talking about 2000 or 1000 CE? Let's say 2000 CE. So in the previous 14 years. Here's my favourite interpretation. And here's the gist: the observed rise in global temperature is too great to have been caused by carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The IPCC's models of the climate are too CO2 sensitive and the real cause is something called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (or PDO). What's the PDO? Real the article. In case you're wondering, the author isn't some crank who works for FOX NEWS, he's a PhD in climate science, formerly with NASA, now with a University somewhere.

His best conclusion tho is on this page. He states, "The confusion between forcing and feedback (loosely speaking cause and effect) when observing cloud behaviour has led to the illusion of a sensitive climate system, when in fact our best satellite observations...suggest an IN-sensitive climate system."

A 'forcing' is an energy imbalance that produces climate change; in the short term this manifests as weather patterns and in the long term as the kind of big changes that scare the shit out of people. A 'feedback' is a result of long term change that itself causes change both in the short and long terms. A good example of a forcing is the temperature differential between the heat stored by land mass and the heat stored by the oceans. This is the most basic cause of weather. An example of a feedback is the melting of the permafrost in Siberia. As it melts, it releases methane (which is between 25 and 100 times more efficient as a greenhouse gas). The methane increases the atmospheric temperature, which melts more permafrost which releases more methane. So when he describes feedback as effect rather than cause, he is being a little disingenuous. But no more than I was when I described Lovelock's changed forecast as a 'walk back'.

I called it that because that's what it sounds like to me. The term was originally used to describe lowering something with a hoist while controlling the speed of descent by maintaining control of the ropes used to lift it. It is much more commonly used to describe the political act of distancing oneself from an earlier comment. Typically this happens when a politician or a spokesperson A) says something really stupid and has to make it seem less stupid, B) accidentally tells the truth and has to spin it, or C) both. "Yes, I did say that but what I meant was..."

Perhaps it's pure coincidence that Lovelock walked his earlier statements back during a book tour. Somehow I doubt it. But what I can't evaluate is the truth (or, more properly, the factuality) of his statements. Truth is, in this case, much less important. I don't give a shit if James Lovelock believes we are in for catastrophic climate changes in the next decade; I care if we are in for catastrophic climate changes in the next decade.

Fortunately, I didn't blow my entire life savings (pitiful as it is) on wine, women, and song based on his earlier prediction. But this is the big problem with climate change as opposed to any other issue we've encountered as a species. When a philosopher tells me there is an abyss between language and dialogue and the "I" that I use to refer to myself doesn't actually refer to myself but to something else (see Saussure on linguistics or Agamben on Saussure) I don't start losing my shit wondering who I really is and whether or not I can properly speak. I ignore them. Saying things that are completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn't a philosopher is a philosopher's job. And when some preacher in Arizona says the world is going to end and gives a precise date for the Rapture I ignore him too. Or maybe link it on Facebook so my friends can have a laugh. You aren't suppose to be able to ignore scientists (with the exception of physicists who are as incomprehensible and every bit as insane as philosophers). I heard on the radio the other day that physicists have demonstrated that a quantum flip in a single Higgs-Boson particle would instantly end the entire universe. You know how much sleep I lost over that? The same as you will.

The current state of climate science is so fucked it is impossible to make sense of without an advanced degree in climate science. And even then only a fraction of the climate science community will agree with you. I've been trying to take a measured approach to this for years - I haven't always been so completely out of my mind with panic. Ten years ago I thought as a percentage proposition and I think a lot of people still think this way. Either climate change is real, is happening, and needs to be avoided or it isn't. If we don't do anything we are placing all of our futures on a bet that it isn't happening and if it is, we're fucked. If we do something, we are costing ourselves a lot of money, some changes in our behaviour and probably a big change in our economic systems but we don't go extinct whether or not it actually is happening. If the weather forecast says there is a 60% probability of rain, you take an umbrella with you. If the weather scientists say there's a 60% probability of an apocalyptic change in our climate, we need a BIG fucking umbrella.

Now what we have is 80% of the climate scientists saying there is a 60% PoA (probability of apocalypse), 10% are saying there is a 0% PoA, and 10% say there's a 100% PoA. And you can't just go with the averages. Some of them are right, some are wrong. Even more significantly, whether it happens is much less important than when it happens. If it's coming in 10 years, we're fucked. If it's 100 years, we can stop it. Maybe. Lovelock's most dire predictions of doom still said, "If we started in 1967..." Which is only 45 years ago so that extra 90 years would make all the difference in the world (maybe). Since we have effectively done nothing in those 45 years, I really wonder whether the added time will make any difference except that there will be a judgement against us (people my age and younger) if we continue to fuck things up (and it turns out to be an issue rather than a weird climatic blip caused by the PDO).

How do people in apocalyptic religions stand this shit? How do they prepare themselves for the rapture over and over? Don't they get tired? I've only been doing this for a couple of months and I'm fucking exhausted. I almost don't care anymore. My ability to be freaked out and appalled is just about finished. And my determination to continue reading and writing about this shit is absolutely gone. I going back to long digressions about The Walking Dead.   

20 years until it hits the fan

Here is a report from the Guardian. The essence? We're all completely fucked. 80% of the human race gone in the next 90 years. The more I look for evidence this isn't happening, the more I find people saying it is happening.

I took a little break from being incredibly freaked out about the coming environmental devastation to get freaked out about how indifferent we can be to the suffering of others. It was kind of like a vacation from panic - during which I was angry and hopeless instead of being frightened and hopeless. So, really, not a great vacation.

I've written many paragraphs in the last few weeks about NTE and my reaction to it. I never really get to the part where I come up with a positive plan to do something about it. And that's an important bit. My difficulty formulating any kind of plan is that to do so I need more information; the more information I collect the more convinced I become there is nothing to do. It's too late. The idea of participating in some kind of effort to force our leaders to change the way things get done seems to me like nothing other than a concession to form. It would be nice, after the icecaps melt and all the coastal cities are underwater, after the rise in mean temperatures turn Europe and most of North America into dustbowls, to be able to stand up to history's scrutiny and not look like a complete dick - complacently consuming and ignoring the increasingly strident warnings while the planet goes over a cliff. The problem with that (not particularly noble) idea is it mistakenly presumes there will be someone to scrutinize, to write a history. And there won't be. That's kind of the problem. I won't be judged by the next generation; they will be too busy pillaging in savage hordes. They are more likely to eat me than judge me, and that takes some of the pressure off.

On the plus side it makes politics more bearable generally. Watching people demonize each other because of governmental spending or "the War on Christmas" or whatever the bullshit is this week is much easier when you know, rather than merely suspecting, that it makes absolutely no difference even in the short term. How do I feel about legalizing pot? Sure, if you want to. I don't care. Should we change our tax code? Will it make a difference in the next 10 years? If not, don't bother.

Actually, it makes a lot of things more bearable. And that's kind of a stinging indictment. The climate scientist / horseman of the apocalypse featured in the Guardian's piece thinks it might have been possible to take effecting action around 1967. I wasn't even born til 1972. So my successes and failures, my achievements and regrets are all placed within the larger context of the End of the Fucking World. Am I going to recycle? Fuck no. Am I going to ride a bike instead of driving? Good one. Hey! That goes in the compost bags! Eat shit. The world is ending and my whole life fits into the period alien students of human history will call the "End of the Beginning of the End Era".

I am no longer under any obligation to have an opinion about anything. I'm kind of happy I no longer have to save for my retirement. My lack of professional success doesn't goad the way it used to. Really, all that's left is a kind of reticent hedonism. I'm not going to start acting like it's last call at Studio 54 but saving for a rainy day is not something I'm going to do either.

If you have money and you want to survive a little longer than most people I recommend you invest in gold and firearms. Watching a lot of zombie movies seems like a good idea too. There is still enough time to get pretty handy with a sword or a long bow. If you have a lot of money, I would advise you to buy a big fucking sail boat. Equip it with some machine guns and some solar panels. Learn how to fish. Stock up on vitamins so you don't get scurvy. Maybe buy an island somewhere in the North. If you owned a big part of an island that happened to have a lot of people who already knew how to fish on it and maybe a few farms, some grocery stores you can plunder for canned goods, maybe some fruit trees too then you could become a feudal lord for a few years. Not a bad way to go. As for me? I'm taking the easy way out as soon as the power goes off.

On Michael Ruppert, 2

So after watching Mike Ruppert's analysis of American geo-politics from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the invasion of Afghanistan I watched a documentary about him called "Collapse" and, fuck, the title really isn't hyperbole. A few years ago a physicist (whose name I forget) published a paper measuring energy use as a function of the size of the global economy. His conclusion was a bigger economy is directly correlated with increased energy use. Seems like a no brainer. We use energy to make things, ship them, build stores to sell them; we use energy getting to work, at work, in whatever industry or profession we are part of and that's all necessary to make money to buy shit. So more things getting made and sold equals more energy use. But it was the corollary that made people freak out; if energy use has to decrease in the future (either by choice to avoid catastrophic climate change or as a result of decreased oil supply) then the economy has to shrink too. Economists said he didn't know shit about the economy. He said he didn't need to since the correlation was so accurate and so universal. Any time we have either a measurement or an estimate of the energy use for a particular period and a measurement or estimate of the size of the economy for the same period (from different sources and compiled independently of each other) the same relationship applies. Ruppert has taken this (and other sources) as a way of predicting our future with oil demand significantly exceeding supply and his conclusion is don't even bother running for the hills, if you aren't there already you're too fucking late.

Again, the problem with evaluating this kind of information (or doom-speak) is evaluating both the information and the conclusions drawn from it. Ruppert doesn't make it easy for people to dismiss him. Collapse is a presentation of his conclusions without much supporting evidence. But where he has time to provide his evidence he is slow, careful, and meticulous. The one very obvious flaw in his reasoning is he starts with a conclusion in mind. In the case of American foreign and domestic policy, he started with his experience of being on the receiving end of an attempted recruitment by the CIA for the purpose of bringing cocaine into the US. He took that and started trying to figure out how wide-spread the problem was and what the motivations could be. In that particular case his end point (that the US government is dependent of laundering drug money for liquidity) is only mildly controversial since everyone knows the CIA is the biggest drug cartel in the world. But getting from "drug smugglers" to "completely dependent on drug profits to prevent economic collapse" is a big leap. He does have evidence (as he sees it) and isn't obviously a maniac. I think I posted a link to a Taibbi article about banks laundering $9B in drug money. That's the tip of a very large iceberg. The estimates for total drug money laundered through the US are between $500B and $1T a year.

I think an honest person has to wrestle with a whole bunch of conflicting motives in evaluating any evidence like Ruppert's. First there is the desire to believe things are generally alright. This not only helps one sleep at night but also excuses a general political apathy. Then there is the desire to dismiss truly alarming information as false simply because it is alarming. One must also acknowledge the fear of accepting really radical ideas because you don't want to seem "bug-fuck" or bat-shit or crazy as a sack of assholes. I think most people would have completely rejected the statement, "The most powerful bankers in the world are completely incompetent, viciously avaricious criminals who knowingly break laws every day and the rest of us are absolutely at their mercy" at any time before 2008. Being in the minority, being very fucking scary, and sounding like a crazy person does not necessarily make one wrong.

My handy rule for figuring out who is a crazy fuck and who is genuinely frightening is the coincidence rule. To borrow yet again from William Gibson, there has to be room for coincidence. If everything you see becomes part of the conspiracy then you've gone off the deep end. Anyone who manages to make something at the scale of the whole world seem either simple or all-encompassing is just crazy. One of Ruppert's strengths is he shows how ever stage of the arguments he makes has a motive people can understand (and one that is documented). He was a cop and still needs motive, means, and opportunity to make his case.

Ruppert sometimes seems like a crazy person. It's not that he doesn't allow for coincidence, it's that he just has that jangling, sketchy quality really bug-fuck people have. I suppose if you have been carefully compiling evidence that your government is a giant criminal clusterfuck for 20+ years and still people won't listen to you - despite the mounting evidence of collusion, criminal behaviour, the revolving door between government and corporations, private prisons being stocked with millions of "drug offenders" while the CIA and the White House use the marines to guarantee the flow of heroin into the country - I guess that would frustrate the fuck out of a person and make them seem a little nutty.

Still, the basis for my conviction Ruppert both believes what he is saying and likely isn't crazy at all is the comparison between him and Alex Jones. At no point does Ruppert obviously distort facts, invoke a great conspiracy, mention the Rothschild family, talk about a New World Order, tie in gun control or death panels. He steers a wide berth around the topics that always pop up in Bat-Shit Crazy Whack-A-Mole. I think of him, at the moment, as a guy I would prefer not to believe.    

On Michael Ruppert

I have a dirty little secret. I don't believe the official line about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center or the other targets. I don't even believe the Pentagon was attacked, unless you count a missile strike launched by American military aircraft as an "attack". There are thousands of people (possibly millions) who believe, like I do, that the official line is a con but I still don't talk about it much. When I was teaching at Waterloo one of my fears was a student would ask about Sept 11 and I would be forced to either lie or out myself as a conspiracy theorist. My strategy at the time was to deliberately misconstrue the question and start talking about the American backed coup in Chilé that ousted Salvador Allende (which also occurred on Sept 11). Fortunately, it never came up.

I don't know why being associated with the Truthers, as some of those who are trying to figure out what actually happened call themselves, is such a bad rap but it is. I was in a meeting where decisions about sessional faculty were being made and the suggestion was made one candidate should be dropped because he talked too much about Sept. 11. "Too much" in this case being "at all". I'm not trying to portray myself as a persecuted minority; I just have enough strikes against me already and don't need to add others if I can avoid it.

But, like the hundreds of other trained building designers in the "Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth", I don't believe jet fuel could cause the collapse of a steel frame tower. It has never happened before or since. If you knew nothing about the statics or stresses involved, if all you knew was Building 7 collapsed despite not getting hit or having any debris land on it, you would have to wonder about the official story. Anyway, that's my confession.

So from time to time, I look for the latest info and arguments by the truthers online. Today I found a lecture by former LAPD narcotics and homocide investigator Michael Ruppert. He talked for almost 2 hours about the US government's 30 year involvement in the international drug trade, showed the documented evidence of forewarning, the political policies of the US re drugs and oil, and gave a very convincing argument the plundering of the Russian economy (which must otherwise be attributed to Free Market insanity) was a deliberate destruction of a nation of almost 200 million people in order to secure dominance in the oil, natural gas, gold, and poppy rich former Soviet republics that border China, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. My conclusion after watching it is the world is even more completely fucked up than I thought and our ability to countenance human suffering for the sake of material wealth is almost limitless.

If you aren't already completely bummed out by the rapid destruction of the natural world (and our own particular niche in the ecosystem), or by the shitty entertainment value of the Olympics, or by The Walking Dead ill-advisedly going into Michonne's backstory, I recommend you search "Mike Ruppert 911" and watch the 2 hour video. You know you are feeling pessimistic about the human race when Ron Paul starts to seem like a statesman (rather than a slightly less crazy version of Ross Perot).

On Alex Jones

Youtube (bane of my existence) thinks I like Alex Jones and always has something new of his for me to watch. It all started because I wanted to watch someone say insane shit for a few minutes. Alex Jones is a huge celebrity. He's almost an industry. He has a radio program, a regular internet "broadcast", he sponsors dozens of products, he is a very big deal. He is also bat-shit crazy. You might remember him for his appearance on Piers Morgan's show - the one that degenerated into him screaming at Piers about "another 1776!!!!!!!!!!!!" I left a few exclamation points off the transcript.

The completely bizarre thing about Jones is that not everything he says is crazy. Every point he makes is crazy but most of the things he says are just true. He takes three or four accurate stats (or facts or opinions of others) and puts them together to make something fucking completely out there, too weird to be real, crazy crazy crazy. Personally, I find the detail with which he embroiders his ravings fascinating. Almost every show he talks about "Agenda 21" like he read the title in a secret book he wasn't supposed to see. What are Agendas 1 through 20? Who knows? It's Agenda 21 that's the killer.

There are thousands, possibly millions of people who believe every word this lunatic says. And, sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, he is a fairly reliable source for info other news outlets won't run with. This is not, as Jones would have it, the "Liberal Media Elite". It's another kind of media self-censorship. The one Chomsky identified but bigger, more ramified. The relationship between the media and the populace isn't as simple as it was in the Cold War (when Chomsky first published his theories of media's self-censoring propensity). No one really knows who the "enemy" is anymore. So painting the enemy as self-destructive, always wrong, fundamentally evil, and against "us" isn't as simple as it was when the Soviet Union still existed.

If you have some time on your hands, watch Jones' explanation for what he admits was a slightly crazed performance on Piers Morgan. I'm not going to link it because then Youtube will become convinced I believe in Agenda 21. Watch any episode of Infowars. As soon as you know what Jones believes - that a conspiracy of rich liberals, crooked monopolists, and dictator wannabes are in control of absolutely everything - it is simple enough to spot the distortions. Why, you might ask, should I waste my time doing such a thing? It's kind of fascinating to watch a guy weave facts into paranoid delusions.

For example, David Suzuki said a few months ago that moving the reactor rods at the Fukushima plant in Japan could release so much radiation the West coast of Canada and the US would have to be evacuated. Immediately before that he said the radiation released into the ocean would spread via ocean currents and, over the course of years or decades, reach the West coast and it would eventually contaminate the groundwater, the fish, the atmosphere, etc. Jones played the clip and started screaming about evacuating the US because of Fukushima. Not a part of the US, not as a result of radiation in the ocean, not over years or decades. The whole US as a result of moving the reactor rods. Suzuki has recently said he regrets the comments he made (possibly as a result of people like Jones deliberately misinterpreting them). Still, Jones performance was something the see. Three or four facts, plus someone else's opinion, equals insane non-sense.

Jones would be a sad character if he wasn't doing so well for himself. There is a lot of shit happening one might consider a genuine reason to freak the fuck out - witness my previous entries on climate change. But Jones is a fake out freak out. He is obsessed with his freedom (from taxes) and his constitutional rights (to own as many guns as he wants). That's a little unfair. Jones knows a surprising amount about the content, interpretation, and history of the US constitution. But his claims about how it is being attacked (as part of Agenda 21) are ludicrous.

The oligarchs with their anti-matter reactors have done a deal with Communist China and we'll have more about that later in the show.

Damn the Olympics!

There are so many things to dislike about the Olympics and so few to like - skeleton racing (completely insane), women's curling (the only watchable winter Olympic sport), that's about it. Some people like figure skating I guess. I've never understood the attraction. It's like stock car racing but instead of crashes, you get slips and the very occasional fall. And when it happens it's just sad. Those idiots spend their entire lives to get to that point and then lose because of a tiny slip. Watching it reminds me of watching Degrassi Junior High - the agonizing wait for someone to do something painfully embarrassing.

Plus there's a weird kind of pressure not to watch these games (which are on at 4 am anyway) because Putin is a homophobe. He's also a brutal dictator and a gangster so maybe people should be less concerned about the whole homophobe thing. It's like finding out a convicted murderer also beat his dog. Yes, it's reprehensible. Anyway, the homophobic laws have given me political cover to do something I was going to do anyway -pretend these Olympic games aren't happening.

I have to wonder how much the Olympics messes with the ratings numbers. Does men's sport style really cut into the audience for Grey's Anatomy? How many people are forced to decide between this week's episode of Elementary and the qualifying rounds for short-track speed skating? Thankfully, AMC and HBO don't give a fuck about the Olympics either so True Detective and The Walking Dead are both on this Sunday.

I had a friend whose sister got into the national ballet company. It was a huge achievement. My response was, "Good for her. She's the best at something no one gives a fuck about." There's a reason hockey is the only sport at the winter Olympics that is also a sport outside the Olympics. It's because pro hockey is an excuse for guys to get drunk with other guys. Have you ever heard about skeleton outside of the Olympics? And that's the craziest sport ever. I saw a video on Youtube of a guy climbing a 1500 ft wall in Mexico with no safety ropes. That's insane. Even he doesn't have balls big enough to slide down an ice track at 120 km/h face first. Still, it's a very weird thing to get excited about. "Canada wins the gold medal is skeleton!" Who cares? No one will remember that person's name in a week. And why would that be a (compulsory) source of national pride?

So I guess I should be thankful the Russians are a bunch of homophobes. All the noise about the anti-gay propaganda laws allows me to escape giving a shit about something I really don't give a shit about.  

G*d, I'm turning into a bore

All this freaking out about the extinction of Homo sapiens is turning me into a bore. Granted, I think it's freak out worthy but there are limits. So here is Giorgio Agamben discussing the end of modernity, Capitalism as a savage religion, and the death of art.

And here is a not-very-good article about the Canadian government's $1.2 B spy headquarters. I didn't think we had spies. Somewhat predictably, the feel-good Canadian style is to call them "watchdogs".

The second article is only really interesting when read immediately after the first. The Agamben interview is all over the place, which is to be expected in an interview with a philosopher that's going to be published on the internet. Agamben makes the point, "A city whose streets and squares are controlled by way of surveillance cameras cannot be a public place: it is a prison." This control by surveillance is precisely why Canada's new spy palace costs so much. Canada doesn't have much in the way of spies; not in the way most people think of them. No CIA, no MI6, certainly no James Bond types. We have nerds with weapons training hoovering up information and compiling it. Agamben's assertion Western governments view all their citizens as virtual terrorists here takes on its double meaning. We have the capacity to be terrorists (as defined by the government) and our crimes will be digital.